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DANTE AND OTHER 
WANING CLASSICS 



DANTE AND OTHER 
WANING CLASSICS 



BY 



ALBERT MORDELL 

Author of The Shifting of Literary Values 




ACROPOLIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 

PHILADELPHIA 

1915 



Tnfoi 



Copyright, 1915, by 
Acropolis Publishing Company 



48 6555 

JUL 2 1942 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 5 

Dante: The Divine Comedy 9 

Milton : Paradise Lost 47 

Bunyan : Pilgrim's Progress 09 

A Kempis : The Imitation of Christ 85 

St. Augustine: Confessions 95 

Pascal: Thoughts 107 

Appendix 123 



L 



PKEFACE 

I have chosen for critical examination six of the most 
famous classics of Christendom. These include two highly- 
lauded epic poems of modern times, the Divine Comedy and 
'Paradise Lost; two works the circulation of each of which has 
been surpassed only by the Bible, the Imitation of Christ and 
■Pilgrim's Progress; a noted religious autobiography, St. 
Augustine's Confessions and an important product in Christian 
apologetics, Pascal's Thoughts. These works are saturated 
in whole or part with theological dogmas that have been dis- 
carded by many people to-day. It is my intention to show 
how medieval fallacies have ruined what might otherwise have 
been perfect literary masterpieces. The passages in these 
books that still live are the secular ones. These we can still 
read with enjoyment, but the authors regarded them as sub- 
sidiary to the theological intent. I have tried to point out 
that the literary value of these classics has waned in propor- 
tion to the extent and falsity of the theology pervading them. 

Literature should not be a vehicle for theology. The poet 
often must describe sensations the theologian fears; he must 
express ideas the latter dare not think. Theology attaches 
itself usually to untenable and evanescent dogmas; its spirit 
is that of restraint; its atmosphere is confining. Literature 
shuns creeds and edicts and theories; it knows few barriers; 
it seeks the open. The chief mission of literature is often to 
undo the evil work wrought by false theologies. It is sublime 
when it depicts tragedies due to conformity with theological 



6 Preface 

ethics. It is glorious when it shows us types who have eman- 
cipated themselves from tenets which enslave the mind and 
stifle the soul. Literature deals with realities, theology with 
illusions. One is the worship of beauty, grants deference to 
the senses, advocates liberality of speculation ; the other means 
fig leaves and cramping garments, horror of the body and the 
natural emotions, enmity to daring investigation. The paths 
of literature and theology lie in opposite directions. One is 
ever seeking new truths, the other rests content with the old. 
One loves liberty, the other bows to authority; one breaks 
down idols, the other worships them. One is restless, ever 
questioning, ever animated; the other is passive, subscribing 
to some faith and chilled to the marrow. 

Literature takes man as he is; it roots itself in human 
nature and material as well as spiritual desires; it shows us 
the individual with his impulses to exercise all his faculties 
and satisfy his instincts. Theology is taken up with devotion 
and repentance; it aims after piety; it wishes to dehumanize 
man. 

" If literature is to be made a study of human nature," wrote 
Cardinal Newman, who certainly was no enemy of theology, 
"you cannot have a Christian literature. It is a contra- 
diction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man." 

It is a matter of great regret that some of the ablest writers 
should have embraced doctrines that have become obsolete. 
What a pity that the presence of exploded dogmas should 
vitiate literary performances ! It is still sadder when we find 
that the entire substructures of some classics are founded on 
the fossilized remains of false principles. 

It must be remembered that the great reputation attained 
by the classics I am examining, was originally created by 



Preface 7 

literary guides who subscribed to the very doctrines which 
these works advocated. The favorable judgment was carried 
down to and repeated by succeeding critics who also adhered 
to the same dogmas. Finally when the foundations of these 
books were shaken, people continued to hold them in the 
greatest esteem, but found other reasons for doing so. We 
should not be misled into blindly worshipping literary pro- 
ductions with whose central ideas and views of life we totally 
disagree. 

My attempt to dislodge these famous works from their high 
place no doubt seems presumptuous. They have the approval 
of the past behind them. It would be much easier to follow 
in the beaten track and add my share of praise. Moreover 
some one will certainly be offended. I have met people who 
admire Milton but are not moved by Dante. Some wax 
eloquent over Pascal but are horrified by A Kempis. How- 
ever it will be seen that my effort is not always iconoclastic. 
I have tried to see value in many of the secular portions in 
these classics which aesthetic critics still admire. But I have 
thought it best to state my adverse views strongly when I 
felt justified. I also did not consider it necessary to engage 
in polemical work and try to demolish dogmas whose falsity 
I take for granted. 

The principles of criticism I have applied have been laid 
down in a booklet I published several years ago called The 
Shifting of Literary Values. For reasons advanced there, I 
do not follow the rule that one should judge books by the 
times in which they were written, for historical criticism 
often tends to become an apology for past error ; and I assume 
that the intellectual import of a book must also be taken into 
consideration apart from the technical qualities in it. 



8 Preface 

I also wish to state that it is not absolutely necessary that 
the reader should have read the various books here dealt with, 
in order to be able to pursue my argument. I have tried to 
give an outline of the plot or a summary of the leading ideas 
of the classics studied, in the course of my criticism. Un- 
doubtedly, however, the person who is familiar with these 
works will be in a more advantageous position to pass upon 
the merits or demerits of my views. 

It is a pleasure to me to be able to express my thanks and 
acknowledgments for encouragement, assistance and reading 
of the manuscript and proofs to my friends David Bortin, 
Esq., of the Philadelphia bar, and George Dobsevage, of New 
York. 

Albert Mordell. 

August IS, 1915. 



/ 



DANTE: THE DIVINE COMEDY 

Dante is usually regarded one of the three greatest of the 
world's poets. The reader has the right to expect that his 
emotions will be aroused to their highest pitch by the poetical 
masterpiece of one who ranks so high. He is justified in 
assuming that he will not find his intelligence insulted too 
frequently and that the poem will possess much that is still 
vital to-day. He dare hope that he will not often see a display 
of bad taste, false judgments and unworthy sentiments. 
Indeed he should demand that a work of such great repute 
as the Divine Comedy should move him more than most 
literary productions do. The poem should be free from most 
of the intellectual errors and artistic deficiencies of other 
literary products of the time in which it was written; it 
should still make a strong appeal to us. 

The reader has but to turn at random to a few cantos of the 
Inferno and of the Paradiso to discover immediately two facts 
about the poet. The first is that Dante delighted in contriv- 
ing horrible and imaginary tortures in the next world for those 
who sinned here. The stern and vindictive Florentine heaps 
up the most revolting and nauseating horrors upon horrors; 
he has appointed himself moral censor of his fellow men and 
torments them with the most hideous punishments; he fails 
in the first function a poet should have, that of winning our 
sympathy. He alienates it from beginning to end, from the 
time he puts in the first circle of hell unbaptized infants and 
great men of Eome and Greece until he shows us in the last 



10 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

circle the fictitious Lucifer chewing in his mouth the Eoman 
patriots Brutus and Cassius along with Judas. The second 
fact about the poet is that he follows the scholastic philosophy, 
and peoples his heaven chiefly with saints, theologians, crusa- 
ders and characters who subscribed to theological absurdities. 
Dante was a man of great learning but little intellect; he 
ignored vast treasures of ancient culture rediscovered prior to 
the Eenaissance. He was hopelessly behind his own time in 
philosophy and religion; he was a serious adherent to dogmas 
and doctrines that many people were abandoning in his own 
day. No poem contains more versified hopeless speculation 
than the Paradiso. Much of this section is no longer con- 
sidered of any aesthetic import and is studied by commentators 
who wish to know the beliefs entertained by the poet. From 
the very first canto where the universe is vaguely described 
as something like unto God, to the last where the poet actually 
tells us that he caught a glimpse of God Himself, we marvel 
as we read that his intellect was so limited. His power as 
a poet is corroded by his weakness as a thinker. 

In the Divine Comedy we having living before us again all 
the bigotry and fatuity of the medieval ages; we have a sum- 
ming up of all the speculation which rational men to-day 
reject; all the superstition, darkness and intolerance of a 
millennium are crystallized in this poem. But there are several 
episodes where the poet forgets his views and tells us of actual 
events of human interest; these stories usually proceed from 
the lips of different characters he meets in his sojourn and are 
the literary portions of the work that continue to live for us. 
They are the only passages that really give the Divine Comedy 
any poetical merit and have carried it forward into our time. 
The famous Paolo and Francesca story is one of these gems 



Dante: The Divine Comedy • 11 

set in a heap of refuse matter. The poet's personality also 
interests us; his comments, his execrations, his hatred of 
moral infamy, his attitude toward friends and enemies he 
meets, all give us an insight into the soul of the unfortunate 
and proud Italian exile. We condemn and admire and pity 
and smile at him as we read on, but he has drawn his own 
portrait as if he had painted it on canvas for us. 

Let us examine the poem as an artistic product. Let us 
•lay stress on all the ugliness, grotesqueness and cruelty in it; 
let us not be hindered by the eulogies that have been pro- 
nounced upon it; let us disentangle the several fine episodes 
and declamations in it. We shall have as a residuum some- 
thing that will still give the poet a place in literature, although 
not among the greatest of the world's poets. We shall dis- 
cover that very few poets have been as much overrated as 
Dante, that he has scarcely any message for us and that the 
few ideas that he did try to convey to us were embodied in 
images that do not stir us. His chief merit will be found to 
reside in his reports of a few disconnected conversations held 
here and there by the poet with some character he meets in the 
other world. But interesting as some of these talks are they 
do not possess sufficient importance to entitle the poet to the 
wide repute and study he has received. It will be salutary 
to humanity if his fame declines and the Dante worship ceases. 
His reputation should not suffer the total eclipse that it ex- 
perienced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but 
civilization will profit if reactionary dogmatists will find that 
they can no longer appeal to his authority for their pernicious 
and obsolete views. 

The Inferno has been the most popular of the three divi- 
sions of the Divine Comedy. It is picturesque and vivid, 



12 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

even though inhuman and exotic. Dante divides his hell into 
nine circles whose gates are guarded by demons and mytho- 
logical figures. Each circle carries within it punishments 
alleged to be fitting for the victims. But as a matter of fact 
the poor wretches in the first six circles are not criminals and 
at the worst are merely victims of venial human frailties. 
The lustful, the gluttonous, the avaricious and the prodigal, 
and the wrathful are punished in a measure out of proportion 
to their faults. These weak people should not have been put 
in hell at all. They are not really wicked as most of the faults 
they have are personal and do not inflict extreme pain upon 
others. Yet the poet parcels the unfortunates off to the 
second, third, fourth and fifth circles respectively, and makes 
them suffer severe agonies. The carnal sinners shriek and 
lament as they are smitten by hurricanes ; the gluttonous howl 
like dogs because of the hail and rain, as they lie on the ground, 
the avaricious and prodigal with great howls roll weights by 
the force of their chests and the wrathful are covered with 
mud, striking and mangling one another piecemeal with their 
teeth. Yet all of us have the instincts of these sufferers and 
we do not like to see our fellow creatures in such travail. We 
grow indignant at Dante because he devises punishments other 
than those nature inflicts upon them for being in the grip of 
such passions. Is not dyspepsia sufficient punishment for the 
glutton ? Is not poverty the natural sequence of prodigality ? 
Is not a debilitated physical condition the result of sensual 
practices? And does not anger nearly always make men 
commit follies that they later regret? We do not need any 
other hell invented than that people find here. 

The victims in the first and the sixth circles are no sinners 
at all. Those in Limbo, the first circle, happen to have had 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 13 

the misfortune of having lived before Christ. They may have 
led exemplary lives, they may have made the greatest contri- 
butions to human thought and left mankind many heritages, 
but since they had never been baptized they sigh eternally. 
Here are the great Greek philosophers and Eoman poets. It 
matters little how noble were the deeds of many of the ancients, 
it is of no avail how profound were their ideas ; these people 
must remain in hell since they did not subscribe to the theo- 
logical inanities adopted by Dante. Many of the Old Testa- 
ment characters, however, escaped hell by a special favor of 
God. Dante has been severely criticized for his Limbo, and 
the injustice of this creation is admitted. 

In the sixth circle the poet places such an intellectual man as 
Epicurus, because he held the soul mortal with the body. 
Heretics are here, and this means that many of the best of the 
world's thinkers lie here lamenting and baking in the red hot 
tombs. Of course the whole conception is distinctly medieval 
and only those who believe that a liberal minded philosopher 
is doomed to burn in hell while the insipid theologian will go 
to heaven will derive pleasure in reading the canto describing 
this circle. Mention should be made that Dante puts here 
the father of his intimate poet friend Guido Cavalcanti, and 
hints that hell awaits the latter also. But heresy is no longer 
a crime ; indeed it generally argues a mind freed from dogma 
and superstition. 

In the lower three circles where the violent, the fraudulent 
and traitors are placed we have more horrible punishments. 
When one recollects what terrible pain is caused temporarily 
by a bruise or a burn, he will strongly condemn a poet who 
invents excruciating physical tortures with which to punish 



14 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

for eternity; he will rage at the delight that the poet takes 
in witnessing the frightful calamities the victims suffer. 

The only way to reduce the poet's whole scheme of punish- 
ments to an absurdity is merely to enumerate the punishments 
in one of these lower circles of hell. Let us take the eighth 
circle called Malebolge, or evil pouches, which is divided into 
ten budgets. Here lie in all their misery those who practised 
deceit or fraud of some kind. Descriptions of their horrible 
agonies cover fourteen of the thirty-four cantos which comprise 
the Inferno. 

The panderers and seducers were going about naked, whipped 
by horned demons and, naturally, under the circumstances, 
were lifting their heels continually. False flatterers were 
whining, puffing their nostrils for they were plunged in human 
excrement, and the head of one was so foul that he was un- 
recognizable. The simonists were plunged head downwards 
with their feet and part of their legs extending upwards from 
circular holes. Their soles were on fire and caused their 
joints to twitch. The false prophets were walking silently 
weeping, but their heads were stuck on their necks backwards, 
so that their tears fell upon their hips. The barrators or 
corrupt officials were boiling in a lake of pitch, and whenever 
one showed himself, devils amused themselves by pronging 
him. They drew up one victim and clawed and flayed him, 
till he fell back again into the lake. In the sixth pouch were 
hypocrites walkingslowly weeping ; they were hooded and their 
eyes were covered by heavy leaden cloaks gilded on the out- 
side. In the seventh pouch were horrible serpents among 
which ran thieves whose hands were tied behind by snakes; 
these fixed their tails and heads through the men's loins. 
Serpents and men changed one into another. The reptiles 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 15 

darted at the robbers, interwined with them and thus the 
transformations went on constantly. The fraudulent coun- 
sellors Were enwrapped by flickering flames of fire. In the 
next pouch were the sowers of discord and schism. Poor 
Mahomet was cleft all the way down the belly with his bowels 
hanging out ; another man was cleft from chin to forelock and 
as he walked around his wounds were closed up till a devil 
opened them again with a sword. Another had his hands 
chopped off and he smeared his face with blood. Still another 
carried his own head in his hands by the hair as a lantern 
and lifted it in the air and spoke from it. In the tenth pouch 
were alchemists, false personators and other falsifiers. There 
was a horrible stench here; two shades were leaning against 
each other and scratching off each other's scabs. 

Dante has however devised even more unique and cruel 
punishments than these. Among the traitors in the ninth 
circle we have Count Ugolino whose head was frozen to that 
of an archbishop, which the Count was gnawing and devouring 
at the nape. Then conceive Lucifer sticking half-way out of 
the ice with three immense faces, black, yellowish-white and 
red, weeping with six eyes, while tears and bloody drivel were 
trickling over his three chins. Beneath each face came forth 
two wings larger than a ship's sail, which the fiend was flap- 
ping. In his mouth he chewed three other traitors. 

To all this we might say cui bono? To heap horrors on 
horrors, to conjure up such loathsome afflictions, to perpetrate 
such fiendish barbarities is evidence of vindictiveness and 
cruelty in the poet and we begin to hate him more than we do 
the sinners. It is sad to contemplate that Dante even believed 
in the reality of these punishments and that he invented them 
for the next world by seeking them on earth. There is some- 



16 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

thing rancorous, something malevolent on the part of one 
to make a list of crimes and inflict upon those who practise 
them such merciless tortures. To an age which even seeks 
to alleviate the pain of the temporarily imprisoned the malice 
of a man who punished for eternity by torture is all the more 
revolting. 

Yet the admirers of Dante defend these punishments on the 
ground that they are the logical retributions brought upon the 
victims, not by Dante, but by the crimes themselves. He is 
supposed to make the penalty fit the crime. The suffering is 
said to be the fulfilment in the next world of what has begun 
here; the hell depicted is alleged to be in man's own heart. 

But where is the connection between the dripping bowels 
of Mahomet and the fact that he founded a religion which 
has millions of adherents but does not meet with the poet's 
approval? There is no ingenuity in punishing the man who 
carried his head in his hand like a lantern, by separating his 
brain from his trunk, because he once separated a father from 
a son. There is no reason for punishing traitors by ice because 
of their coldness, any more than in making heretics subject 
to fire in accordance with the medieval tradition. The conse- 
quence of robbery is not shown by making thieves steal the 
bodies of serpents. There is no relation between the corrup- 
tion of barrators and the lakes of pitch into which they are 
plunged. The lesson that sin carries its own damnation with 
it is not shown by depicting gluttons torn to pieces by a three- 
headed dog, amidst falling hail. And we must admit that 
some sins like usury never carry any evil consequences for 
the usurer, but should be avoided simply because an undue 
advantage is taken of a fellow creature. Other sins like defi- 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 17 

ance of God are purely imaginary on the poet's part; one 
might as well defy the law of the conservation of energy. 

It is also claimed in defense of the poet that his age needed 
revolting images to convey moral lessons and that he saw his 
own thoughts transformed into real though horrible pictures. 
But this will not extenuate the matter. For us such images 
offer little of any value. They arouse our smile often when 
meant to awaken our terror. This method of teaching a moral 
lesson is extinct and authors to-day give us more effective pic- 
tures of the evils caused by certain vices. The consequences of 
avarice, drunkenness, seduction and adultery have been shown 
more effectively in some of the novels of the nineteenth century 
than in Dante's poem. No one expects these vices and crimes 
to be extinguished by literature; and our modern writers are 
often greater artists because they are interested in studying 
the sinner and depicting his emotions than in pointing directly 
a moral, as Dante does. The fact that Dante used these 
revolting images renders him of less artistic value to us, nor 
should we forget that he believed in the reality of his images. 

Dante has not succeeded in showing that a man is punished 
by that wherewith he sins. He has simply run the gamut of 
the most fiendish sufferings and distributed them among some 
sinners. He has deliberately searched for instruments inimi- 
cal and deadly to the body and to life and has employed them 
upon poor wretches, chiefly Italians of his age. We hold our 
nostrils as we read; we cover up our ears; we hide our eyes. 
Did one ever before see brought together such stinking odors, 
filth, excrement, blood, mutilated bodies, agonizing shrieks, 
mythical monsters ? 

Dante punishes his sinners for one offence only, although 
most people are guilty of several sins. Thus there are traitors 



18 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

in the ninth circle who, having also committed murder, should 
be in the stream of boiling blood in the seventh circle. But 
it would be rather difficult to have a man in several circles 
of hell at the same time, so the poet picks out the worst crime 
and punishes him for that alone. There have been people who 
were guilty of almost all the sins and crimes that Dante men- 
tions, though it is hardly likely that there were many who were 
free from a single one of the vices punished in hell. Had the 
poet known all the details of the lives of his saints in heaven, 
he would have found that most of them also could have been 
placed in some circle in the nether regions. Men cannot 
really be ticketed off and labelled with some sin; most folk 
have tendencies to several faults. Dante's whole scheme of 
punishment is unfair. Hypocrites and magicians, thieves 
and flatterers are punished more severely than murderers who 
are placed in a circle above them in hell. According to Dante 
usurers are more wicked than adulterers, magicians more 
deserving of chastisement than degenerate perverts. We have 
Caesar among the virtuous heathen in the first circle, though 
we know he also belongs among the carnal sinners with Cleo- 
patra. The poet is cruel to suicides who ought rather to be 
pitied; he is lenient to the contemptible Paris who stole 
another man's wife and caused a great war. 

As a matter of fact we all belong simultaneously to the hell 
and the heaven of Dante. If I have the fault of being a 
glutton and am nevertheless a just man, should I be placed 
in the third circle of hell and no attention paid to the virtue 
which would entitle me to a place in heaven? Should not 
my noble quality of that rare virtue justice make the poet 
lenient to my venial fault of prodigality? There is not a 
man who is not guilty of some sin, there is not one who does 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 19 

not possess some virtues. Great deeds and a noble character 
can wipe out the memory of certain sins; the commission 
of some crimes can never atone for the possession of some 
good attributes. We may pardon a kind man his anger but 
we will never forgive a murderer because he was a theo- 
logian or a fighter for the cross. The final judgment to be 
pronounced upon men should be made by weighing all their 
good and evil qualities. We often are content to see a man 
with some faults provided some great virtues go therewith. 

Then Dante does not think of studying his victims and 
their sins. He is too interested in railing at vices to pay 
attention to them as objects of research. He is always the 
moralist, never the psychologist. Unlike Spinoza, who studied 
all the baser emotions disinterestedly, he could not analyze 
the maladies of the soul without uttering the harshest rebukes. 
He is like a physician who, called in to diagnose and cure a 
disease, would spend his time in railing at the patient instead, 
for becoming sick. 

So Dante condemns everything and everybody, kings, poets, 
popes, friends, statesmen and even mythical creatures of 
antiquity: He curses cities and piles the most vituperative 
epithets upon them. He tells Pistoia to decree to make ashes 
of herself; he invites Florence to rejoice because her name is 
spread in hell and says that if the calamities which her enemies 
crave for her befell her it would not be too soon. He hopes 
the Arno Eiver may drown every person in Pisa. He refers 
to the same river in his Purgatorio where he describes its 
course through towns which are referred to as the dens of ani- 
mals. The river flows past the abodes of foul hogs, curs, 
wolves and foxes by which are meant the cities of Casentino, 



20 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

Arezzo, Florence and Pisa respectively. As for the Genoese, 
he asks why they are not scattered from the world. 

One sees examples of his cruelty in the way he treats some 
of the unfortunates in hell. He asks Virgil to have the cruel 
Filippo Argenti soused in the broth of filth in the fifth circle, 
and when the wish is gratified he thanks God therefor. Virgil 
approves of Dante's attitude and himself says to the wretch, 
" away there with the other dog." Dante remarks on another 
occasion, when a serpent coils himself about the neck of a 
blaspheming thief, " from that time forth the serpents were 
my friends." But Dante's wrath exercises itself especially 
on two traitors. He pulls a tuft of hair out of the head of 
one of them in order to make him reveal his identity. This 
was the infamous traitor Bocca degli Abati, who was respon- 
sible for the defeat of the Guelphs of Florence. The other 
instance of the poet's reprehensible conduct is in his treatment 
of Friar Alberigo, who killed his own brother and nephew. 
This traitor begged the poet to lift his frozen eyelids so that 
he might weep a little and ease his woe. The poet promised 
to do so if the friar would tell his name. When Alberigo did 
so, Dante broke his promise, saying that to be churlish to him 
was courtesy. 

Dante makes even Virgil brutal and has him quote from 
Aquinas some inhuman statements. When Dante wept at 
the sufferings of the soothsayers, Virgil tells him that he 
should pity no one in hell, that a man is a criminal who is 
moved by compassion at the judgments of God, no matter how 
cruel they are. 

Most of the characters in hell however are Florentines and 
the poet revenged himself on his enemies by putting them 
here. He has been severely censured for sending his master 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 21 

and teacher Brunette- Latini to the circle where degenerates 
were punished. Dante is bitter against the sin of ingratitude, 
yet what worse ingratitude do we find than his conduct here? 
He is aroused by sorrow, but he might have kept silent on the 
score of his teacher's sin. The episode is one of the finer ones 
of the Inferno and is very touching. If a man remembers 
even his friends in his scheme of punishment we may expect 
little mercy from him for his enemies. And many of the 
characters in hell are obscure people of whom history makes 
no mention. The folly of the poet's scheme may be seen if 
we were to imagine some man in public life to-day placing 
many of his contemporaries in hell. Conceive of a poet con- 
signing American presidents, poets, generals and statesmen to 
the lower regions. 

One of the artistic weaknesses of the Inferno is the intro- 
duction of monsters and demons in hell, in some cases to take 
part in the punishment of the victims. Commentators find 
allegoric significance in the poet's choice of mythical creatures, 
but it is generally conceded that bad taste was displayed in 
the choice. We have Charon, who had about his eyes wheels 
of flame, ferrying the damned souls across the Acheron; 
Minos, the judge who girded himself with his tail as many 
times as the grade he willed that the damned be sent down to 
hell ; Cerberus, with three heads, red eyes, a greasy black beard, 
a big belly, barking and rending' the gluttons. We have the 
hideous Furies with serpents for hair and the human-faced 
Harpies with their feathered bellies. There is the Minotaur 
Bull and the serpent-bodied man-faced Ceryon. Two of the 
most preposterous conceptions of the poet are in his making 
the Centaurs shoot with arrows at the murderers in the river 
of blood, and in his account of the sport in which the demons 



22 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

indulged by prodding the barrators in the boiling pitch. 
The last monster who appears is Lucifer himself and he is the 
victim of one of the punishments. His body is about fifteen 
hundred feet long and his haunches are surmounted by the 
poets who thus enter purgatory. 

But fortunately there is some merit in the Inferno and 
this is due to a half dozen or more episodes. These show 
pathos, sorrow, tragedy of genuine human interest and possess 
artistic value. The most famous of them all is the sad story 
of Francesca da Kimini, a story that has been used by other 
poets as themes for drama and poems. Deserving almost 
equal fame is the celebrated tale by Count Ugolino of the 
starvation of his sons. The story moves us with more terror 
than the description of the punishments in the lowest circle 
where the tale is related. Dante had command of the art of 
making our flesh creep by relating a true tale ; he did not need 
to contrive horrible tortures. 

It is a pleasure to discover these little tales here and there 
and we will mention them. There is something pitiful about 
the suicide Of Pier delle Vigne, a poet who killed himself 
because his eyes were put out; instead of seeking for more of 
his brief but sad tale, Dante and Virgil ask him to tell them 
whether the soul is ever loosed from the tree, into which every 
suicide has been changed. The meeting of Dante with Pope 
Nicholas III is fine, because of the irony in the exclamation 
of the simonist pope when he mistook the poet for the then 
living Pope Boniface who was expected here. We are moved 
by the description of his thirst which the counterfeiter Mas- 
ter Adam gives to his visitors; we read again with interest 
the story of his wanderings which that fraudulent counsellor 
Ulysses tells; we follow the story of G-uido de Montefeltro as 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 23 

he relates how he told Pope Boniface not to keep a promise, 
though we lose the sense of reality in his tale when he tells 
how the Black Cherubim snatched him from St. Francis and 
carried him to hell. We note the poet's conversation with 
Farinata, in the circle of unbelievers, about the battles between 
the Ghibellines and the Guelphs, but the conversation relapses 
into frivolity when the poet persuades him to explain why 
the dead can foretell the future but are ignorant of the present. 

Having seen Dante as a painter of the horrible, let us con- 
sider him as a religious thinker and a contemplator of ideal 
happiness. We shall examine his Paradiso which some critics 
regard as the most profound of the three divisions of his poem, 
although it has been the least popular. Much of the section 
is nothing more than theology in rhyme. We will take up 
the second section, the Purgatorio, last. 

Dante divides his heaven into ten parts, since there are 
different orders of blessedness for no other reason than that 
it so pleases God. Seven of the heavens are named after the 
sun, the moon and the five planets then known. The last 
three are those of the fixed stars, the crystalline heaven and 
the empyrean. These abodes are inhabited by saints, theo- 
logians, crusaders, apostles and other religious folk. Only 
three of the regions are not inhabited by the specially religious. 
These are the heavens of Mercury, Yenus and Jupiter which 
are the dwelling places of followers of fame, of lovers and of 
righteous kings respectively. 

There are about ten cantos that treat of theology alone, while 
there are a half a dozen cantos that are unadorned biography 
and history. All this occupies about one-half of the Paradiso 
while the rest of the poem consists of accounts of the heavens 
and of the curious deeds of the spirits there. Let us examine 



24 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

the contents of some of these theological cantos; let us study 
some of the representative heavens, such as those of the sun 
and of Jupiter where the theologians and righteous kings 
respectively dwell ; let us also traverse the highest heaven, the 
empyrean. We shall carefully go through the historical and 
biographical cantos, for Dante interests us most when he 
refers to this earth. We shall then see how much merit the 
'Paradiso contains. 

Dante plunges very early into his theological and historical 
discourses. At the conclusion of the very first canto, we have 
Beatrice's discourse on the ordaining of the universe by Provi- 
dence. As is frequently the case with her, it is an explanation 
which does not elucidate. In the next canto she gives a curious 
account of the origin of the spots on the moon. She maintains 
that the diverse virtues of God acting through the Angelic 
Intelligence, shine through the moon diversely and hence 
create the distinction between light and darkness. In the 
third 'canto she shows that souls do not go to the stars, as 
Plato thought, but rather to the empyrean; she then proves 
to her own satisfaction that there is no injustice, that the very 
fact that God's justice seems unjust to mortal eyes is argu- 
ment or proof of faith. She also sets forth the doctrine that 
people who have good intentions when forced by violence of 
others to break them must nevertheless not receive credit for 
their virtue; that they should be punished for a wrong they 
committed through no fault of their own. The viciousness 
of Beatrice's arguments does not interest us so much as the 
poet's approval. He says that her speech so overflows him that 
he can scarcely thank her sufficiently, and that the intellect 
is only satisfied when it is illumed by the truth as in the present 
instance. Then the poet wants to know if man can make 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 25 

satisfaction for broken vows. She explains that a vow may 
be changed with clerical dispensation if the matter substi- 
tuted exceeds in worth that of the original vow. Then follows 
a canto of history, the story of the growth of the Eoman 
Empire, told by Justinian in the planet Mercury; next we 
have Beatrice's arid discourse on redemption and then the 
talk by Charles Martel in the planet Venus on the impossibility 
of imperfection in the universe and on the cause of variety and 
diversity everywhere. 

Thus the reader has traversed eight cantos of the Paradiso 
and the only bit of poetry that he has encountered is the brief 
story of Piccarda Donati telling how she was forced to leave 
the cloister and thus break her vow. Even her narrative is 
ruined by theological dogmas when she explains why spirits 
in the lower division of heaven cannot envy those in the higher 
ones ; she concludes with that overrated line " His will is our 
peace." 

When Justinian tells the history of Eome he does so to 
illustrate the poet's belief that the Eoman Empire existed 
by Divine Eight because Christ was born and died to save 
mankind during the supremacy of the Empire. It was by 
the authority of Eome that Christ died and saved man; all 
this was especially ordained by God. God made Eome the 
mistress of the world so as to save us all. The only reason 
that God made Eome go through its period of history was it 
should reach the times of Tiberius and of Titus, as in the 
reign of the former Christ was crucified and in the reign of 
the latter this crucifixion was avenged upon the Jews in the 
destruction of their temple. God was happy at both events, 
he ordained and waited for the death of His son and yet He 
punished the Jews for causing it; and He made the Eoman 



26 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

Empire prosper so as to bring all this about. When Justinian 
is not advancing this most amazing and ludicrous theory he 
gives us dry history. 

But Justinian's historical tale becomes the text for an 
elaborate and hopeless discourse by Beatrice on redemption. 
The substance of it was of great importance to the poet and 
for that matter still is to many people. She explains to the 
poet why God wanted and expected the Jews to crucify Jesus. 
It was because Adam's original disobedience was so great that 
no amount of human humility could atone for it, so God Him- 
self had to take the burden on his shoulders. Adam's sin 
was atoned for by Christ's death; God's son himself had to 
die for it. Man was created directly from God and hence 
needed a God to die for him. Another futile discourse of 
Beatrice is the one about the creation and the nature of 
angels. We learn that the angels are pure form, that they 
are infinite, that no two are of the same species, etc. She 
even appeals to the authority of Jerome and then denounces 
teachers who do not agree with her absurd views. She attacks 
traffic in indulgences though not indulgences themselves. 

Nor should mention be omitted of the examination to which 
the poet was subjected by three of the saints in faith, hope 
and charity. The poet's views of faith are worthy of com- 
ment. Faith according to the poet is belief in something 
that cannot be proved; it is supported by its own substance 
and hence is called evidence also. The proof of faith that we 
have is the Bible which is divinely inspired. The miracles 
prove that the Holy Writ is true, even though we know of 
them through it. But because the conversion of the world 
to Christianity without miracles would have been a greater 
miracle than any in the Scriptures, the Bible must be true. 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 27 

After this convincing and irrefutable argument the poet tells 
us that his faith is belief in a God and in the three eternal 
persons who are of one essence. The picture of St. Peter 
examining the poet and appearing as one of the naming spheres 
upon fixed poles and revolving as within the fittings of clocks 
and then encircling the poet thrice because he was so well 
pleased with the answers is undignified. 

There can be very little doubt that among the most ludi- 
crous portions of the poem is the heaven of the sun. where the 
theologians were. The poet commences with a discourse on 
astrology; he becomes confused, as does also the reader, and 
he then throws aside his task, saying, " Henceforth feed thy- 
self." The authors of theological books are made to perform 
amusing feats not in keeping with the seriousness of their 
calling on earth. They wheel around the poet and Beatrice 
thrice in the form of shining lights. Thomas Aquinas names 
them and they wheel around again singing and keeping time. 
They cease and revolve again. Meanwhile an inner circle of 
lights, who are the spirits of some other obscure theologians 
enter upon their gyrations, matching motion with motion, 
song with song. They danced, exalted and sang together. 
The effect was as if one ring of brilliant stars revolved around 
another. They sang not of Bacchus and Paean but of three 
in one. They would occasionally cease, to give St. Thomas 
or some one else an opportunity to talk. 

These theologians were^all authors of books full of false 
speculation, which are unread to-day. For some reason or 
other Solomon is one of the theologians, although because of 
his amorousness and idolatry he should have been in hell. 

Thomas Aquinas is the first spokesman and he enters upon 
the following important problem. Why is Solomon not as 
3 



28 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

wise as Adam and Jesus, since he has the reputation of being 
the wisest of men? The reason is he was not created imme- 
diately of God as they were. St. Thomas then goes into some 
unintelligible and meaningless details about creation; and 
concludes that after all Solomon was only the wisest king. 
He is somewhat confused by his own explanation, grows angry 
and attacks some authors who did not agree with his views, 
and comments on the vanity of human judgment. The next 
equally important problem that is to be solved is the follow- 
ing: When the resurrection comes how will the eyes of the 
resurrected bear so strong a light as that in which the spirits 
are now clothed? The spirits dance and rejoice that the 
question was raised. It was so intricate and difficult that 
they asked Solomon to answer it. Solomon answers that at 
the resurrection the body will receive new glory and our 
power of vision will increase. An amen greets the solution, 
and the spirits even show a desire to have their bodies back. 
These are examples of futile medieval problems that the poet 
seriously entertained. It must be understood also that he 
gave full faith to these explanations. 

What a hopelessly clouded brain Dante had ! When the 
great pioneers of the Eenaissance were teaching the people 
liber? T views he was trying to make them penetrate deeper 
into darkness. He ignored the heritages of the times; he 
turned away from their splendors and set to verse notions 
that were vapid and paltry. He hated original writers, and 
was the great foe of individualism. He bowed abjectly before 
authority. 

In the heaven of the sun the lives of St. Francis and St. 
Dominic are recited. St. Thomas tells of St. Francis's pov- 
erty, dwells on some details of his life and describes his alle- 



Dante: The Divine Comedi ., 29 

gorical marriage to the Lady Poverty. The narrative con- 
cludes with an outburst against ecclesiastical abuses. The 
life of St. Dominic is narrated by another saint who tells of 
his exploits, of his wedding to faith and of his smiting heret- 
ical stocks with most vigor where the resistance was greatest ; 
the tale ends with an attack on the backsliders in religion. 
Both of these biographies might have been contributed to a 
dictionary; they are really space fillers here. The characters 
do not interest us, at least as examples to emulate, though all 
the world has loved St. Francis. 

It should be added that in the various declamations against 
the church and popes and religious practises, the poet simply 
rails at some surface abuses. It never occurs to him to ques- 
tion the whole structure of the supernatural or the very foun- 
dations of institutions; he never probes deeply. He points 
out flaws here and there but he does not apply the scalpel to 
the putrescence beneath. 

The conception of the heaven of Jupiter, the abode of the 
righteous kings, is probably more risible than that of the 
dwelling place of the theologians. All the spirits here includ- 
ing King David know Latin. Some of them shaped them- 
selves into letters of the alphabet, forming a brilliantly lit 
sentence in Eoman letters. They formed, while flying and 
singing, the words from the Book of Proverbs " Diligite jus- 
titiam qui judicatis terrain," " Love righteousness ye that be 
judge of the earth." At the last letter M the lights spread 
out into the head and neck of an eagle, who is a symbol of 
monarchy and hence, according to the poet, of justice. The 
eagle sang and explained to him that Divine Justice is beyond 
our comprehension and should be taken on faith. 



30 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

The eye of the eagle is King David; and the eyebrow con- 
sists of five lights, also earthly kings, two of whom are pagans, 
Trajan and Ehipeus the Trojan. The Eoman king is in 
heaven because he became alive again after being in hell and 
then believed in Christ, according to the legend, while Ehipeus 
believed in redemption, through God's special grace. 

The eagle next presents to itself for solution a plausible 
argument against Divine Justice. Where is the justice that 
condemns a man who was born a thousand miles away and 
never heard of Christ, through no fault of his own? Why 
should he not be saved if he has lived a righteous life ? After 
calling those who ask such questions, earthly animals and 
gross minds, the eagle gives an answer which amounts to 
this: So much is just as is consonant with the Primal Will 
which is the Supreme Good. Then the bird names some unjust 
kings and calls them by vile epithets. 

As we see this eagle of brilliant lights we can scarcely 
resist picturing to ourselves a bird formed of electric lights 
such as we see in advertisements, lighting up whenever the 
reading matter, also of incandescent lights, goes out in dark- 
ness. No one will be led to practise justice by seeing this 
awkwardly conceived eagle. Most certainly the poet regards 
any speculation as to the existence of Divine Justice as a great 
heresy. But as a matter of fact there is no justice in nature, 
where all living animals feed on one another, where suffering 
and pain are common, where might and chicanery usually 
triumph. Justice has no connection with religion but is a 
convenient arrangement to prevent misery among men. It 
springs from a moral sense in man just as hatred of ugliness 
arises from an aesthetic sense. It evolved with other senti- 
ments such as pity and fear, in the natural evolution of man 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 31 

from his savage state. The conception of justice shows the 
general moral view-point held by a community and changes 
with time and place. To nature, our conception of right 
means nothing; she takes no interest in the fact that we may 
follow worthy human ideals and yet suffer therefor. A savage 
has notions of justice also; one could no more expect nature 
to pay tribute to them than to our own. 

Many who are willing to concede that there is little if no 
literary merit in any of the parts of the Paradiso so far 
referred to, find it however in two other sections, first in those 
cantos containing the story, declamation and prophecy of 
Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida whom the poet meets in Mars 
among the fighters for the cross and secondly in the con- 
cluding cantos of the poem where the empyrean is described. 

Of the episode about Dante's ancestor, it may be said that 
it contains those oft quoted lines prophesying the poet's exile, 
lines which do linger in the reader's memory: "Thou shalt 
make proof how the bread of others savors of salt, and how 
hard a path is the descending and mounting of another's 
stairs. And that which will weigh heaviest upon thy 
shoulders will be the evil and senseless company which thou 
wilt fall into in this valley." There is an impassioned para- 
graph where the old soldier contrasts the luxury of the new 
Florence with the simplicity of the old, and we like his parting 
advice to Dante to attack severely. But there are too many 
obscure names and too much genealogy and history which 
have only local significance. The crusader is of no interest 
to any one and we know of him only through Dante; he is 
here because of the poet's vanity. Except for a few passages, 
the episode about the poet's ancestry is out of place in the 
Paradiso. 



32 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

But the poet's admirers have adulated the account of the 
empyrean. The chief attribute of this region is the flood 
of dazzling light that exists here ; the poet lays so much stress 
upon this that our eyes become blinded and we want a little 
darkness. There is the river of light in which the saints are 
mirrored. It becomes a vast rose, wherein are descending 
thousands of angels like a swarm of bees, their faces bathed 
in flame, their wings in gold and their forms whiter than 
snow. Beatrice soon takes a place along with Virgin Mary 
and some of the women mentioned in the Bible, such as Bachel 
and Sarah. There are places for saints and innocent children ; 
there are various degrees of innocence for no other reason than 
that God so wills it. The poet through prayer of St. Bernard to 
Virgin Mary obtains grace, and soon sees God Himself and the 
poem ends. He makes again and again famous addresses to 
light but he is really calling darkness. Every one reading 
the poem wonders that the insignificant Beatrice and the 
women of the Old Testament who had no particular virtue, 
should be in the rose in the highest heaven while Aristotle is 
in hell. 

No one wants to be in this rose, if this is the highest goal 
for the human race. This place is not for heroes or thinkers 
or benefactors to humanity. The poet has brought together 
puerile conceptions that do not appeal to us. His Beatrice 
is indeed theology. As an ideal of women she is absolutely 
extinct. One cannot help speculating whether she has any 
passions at all. She is bloodless, characterless and unreal. 
She was an ideal to the poet and we sympathize more with 
his account of her in his Vita Nuova, for there she appears to 
be a live woman. But here she irritates and repels us. 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 33 

She drives the poet into an abyss of falsehood instead of lead- 
ing him to knowledge. 

Let us now return to the second section of the poem. 

Dante's Purgatory is a mountain that arose from the waters 
in the southern hemisphere, in antipodes to Jerusalem and 
was forced out by a portion of the earth which fled when Satan 
fell. The top of this mountain is the earthly paradise, while 
the slope is divided into seven ledges for the purification of 
sinners. 

The earthly paradise is described in the last cantos of the 
Purgatorio. There is a lengthy description here of the pro- 
cession of the chariot representing the church. This is drawn 
by a griffon, half eagle and half lion, who symbolises Christ. 
Beatrice sits on the left hand border of the chariot. The 
griffon ties his car to the mystic tree which was at first barren 
and now blossoms forth. Then an eagle descends upon the 
chariot, which is also attacked by a dragon, and we see seven 
heads with horns, and a harlot and giant kissing each other; 
finally the giant drags the wagon off into the woods. The 
eagle is representative of sins of the empire, the dragon carry- 
ing off part of the car represents a schism in the church, the 
seven horned heads are the deadly sins, the harlot and giant 
are the pope and the king of France. There are other symbols ; 
there are twenty-four elders representing the books of the 
Old Testament, and winged creatures behind them who stand 
for the four evangelists : there are ladies typifying the virtues. 
We find little to move us in his account of the procession; 
moreover Dante imitates the Apocalypse too closely. 

The first meeting of the poet with Beatrice displeases the 
reader. She rebukes him for having paid attention formerly 
to other women, and whether the reference is to Dante's 



34 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

amorous affairs or to his backsliding from theology, she 
annoys us with her jealousy and intolerance. We also have 
her prophecy about the mysterious DXV, 515, who will save 
the country. Then there is an account of the geography of 
the earthly paradise, of the origin of the winds here and of 
the sources of the two streams Lethe and Eunoe. 

Let us now examine the region called ante-purgatory and 
then some of the ledges of purgatory proper. 

There are pictures and scenes in his Purgatorio that are 
among the best Dante wrote, though they are few, but the 
underlying idea of purgatory is as pernicious and absurd as 
most of his other ideas. The application of his theory of 
repentance produces strange effects. A great criminal repents 
on his death-bed or acknowledges regrets for his crime and he 
is consigned to purgatory, which means that he will ultimately 
reach heaven. A venial sinner like some wrathful or glutton- 
ous men, may be accidentally killed or die suddenly and have 
had no opportunity to repent and he becomes a suffering 
denizen of hell for eternity. 

It is easy to repent, but that does not undo the consequences 
of our sin. Most murderers regret their deeds after killing 
but that does not restore life to the victim, or assuage the 
agonies of the relatives and friends. Those who maim, ravish, 
betray can usually make no reparation for the wrongs done 
and hence their repentance is of little avail. Nor does a 
man's disposition usually become changed by repentance. 
Place him in the same situation and he will generally do the 
same deeds again. 

In ante-purgatory are the souls of those who died in the 
contumacy of the church, the negligent who postponed repent- 
ance to the last hour, spirits who delayed repentance and met 



Da^te: The Divine Comedy 35 

with death by violence but died repentant, and princes who 
had been negligent of salvation. These must wait various 
periods of time before they can get into purgatory proper; 
these periods of time may be shortened by the prayers of the 
good on earth. A mere accident might have prevented repent- 
ance and the repentants might have been in hell. The negli- 
gent who postponed repentance to the last hour, might have 
been suddenly killed and thus their chances of salvation would 
have been lost. Then the doctrine that the prayers of good 
people will shorten the periods of suffering in ante-purgatory 
and purgatory proper is indefensible. 

The punishments of these who repented of the seven deadly 
sins are also cruel though not as much so as those in hell. 
The proud were going under their load, more or less burdened 
and weary; the envious were covered with coarse hair-cloth, 
and iron wires pierced their eyelids; the wrathful wandered 
about in dense smoke; the slothful were running and crying 
out examples of diligence; the avaricious were weeping, lying 
on the earth turned downwards; the gluttons were compelled 
to gaze at fine apple trees whose fruit they could not pluck, 
and hence were hollow-eyed, pallid, and wasted; while the 
lustful spirits moved in flames of fire. The repentant sinners 
were all compelled to recite verses and were shown examples 
of those who practised different conduct from their own. As 
the poet ascended the ledges each of the seven p's which an 
angel had traced on his forehead dropped off. 

There are also scientific and theological discourses in the 
Purgatorio, though not as numerous as those in the Paradiso. 
We have the lengthy discourse of the poet Statius in the seventh 
ledge, on generation, on the infusion of the soul in the body 
and his explanation as to why the spirits of the gluttons are 



36 Dante and Othek Waning Classics 

lean; there are discourses by Marco Lombardo on free-will 
and the corruption of the world, and by Virgil on the classifi- 
cation of the sins and on free-will. Statius's account of the 
trembling of the mountain which is due to the rising of a pure 
soul to heaven is another one of the risible follies that crowd 
Dante's poem. 

Nevertheless the Purgatorio contains more human scenes 
and finer pictures than either of the other two portions of the 
poem. It is better literature and has several episodes that 
deserve to be permanently read for their beauty. It also con- 
tains the poet's famous impassioned invective against Italy. 
There is the celebrated picture of historical figures who were 
guilty of pride, and of their punishment. The poet makes 
the passage effective by his vivid impressionistic touches. We 
again see Mobe in tears, Saul upon his sword, and Troy in 
ashes. There are also examples taken from history of humility 
engraven in the rock. We again see David dancing before the 
ark, and Trajan promising to help the widow avenge her slain 
son. We also like the conversation between the poet and 
Oderisi of Gubio, a votary of the art of illumination. The 
description of the ledge of pride is quite successful, even 
though diatribes in literature against the deadly sins are 
obsolete. 

We are also interested in listening to Casella singing a 
canzone of Dante at the latter's request; we admire the account 
of the meeting of Statins with Virgil and the fine tribute paid 
to him. We rejoice in the meeting of other poets like Sordello 
and Guinicelli with the author of the iEneid. The memory 
of his wife Nella which moves Forese Donati stirs us and we 
revel in his attack on the Florentine women. 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 37 

But a poem must be judged as a whole, and the central idea 
behind it; the philosophy to be gathered from it must be con- 
sidered. As a poem with a purpose, the Divine Comedy is a 
failure not only because of its inability of conviction, but 
because of its perverted view-point and its emphasis on the 
trivial. The poet seeks to make us more moral chiefly through 
theology. Besides being free from sin and crime, we must, 
according to his view, subscribe to the belief in the trinity, in 
original sin, in the atonement, in the miracles of the Bible 
and in the divine right of the pope. We must be baptized, 
we must not have the slightest doubt of the efficacy and power 
of prayer, we must say mass, we must not question belief in 
resurrection. Satan must be a real creature to us. The saints 
must be regarded as still working miracles ; the angels must be 
actual denizens of the skies in whom we must believe. 

The poem makes re-echo in our ears those words repeated in 
all religious books for the last two thousand years — " sin," 
" repentance," " beatification/' In fact these words sum up 
the whole intent of the poem. We must be conscious of our 
sins, we must repent of them and thus attain beatification. 
Dante wishes to make us be bowed down more heavily by the 
burden of our sins; he persuades us to search them out; he 
wants us to be united with God, which really means to be 
attached to the dogma of a creed. He slanders human nature 
most foully and seeks to impose upon us imaginary obliga- 
tions for its redemption. 

The idea of sin, like a worm, eats through the core of the 
poem and makes it unpalatable. And many a thing is sin 
according to Dante which is sometimes trivial, and sometimes 
actually meritorious. To differ with authority, to follow out 
your own destiny, to set at naught superstition, to defy 



38 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

unsound institutions, are sins according to the poet. He is 
harsh in condemning if he sees that you possess all those 
human instincts which you are justified in cultivating; he 
rails at traits of the flesh which it is natural to be inherent in 
it; he maintains all faults should be exterminated but he does 
not understand that if such were the case many of our virtues 
would go along with them. He is ever setting up before us 
the conception of sin as the only reality in the world; he sets 
horrible examples before us; he finds a panacea for it in the 
worship of dogma. 

The poet endeavors to show us how we may reach the 
highest form of life ; he has a definite theory as to its nature. 
But no one would seriously recommend to us to-day the 
scheme that the poet has in mind. We do not want pictures 
of the sufferings of the worst criminals to serve as examples 
to us not to commit like crimes. Why rail against the crimes 
of murder, robbery, treason? Who asserts that they are not 
wrong? It seems that when the poet is in the right he is 
always commonplace. Why also set before us the ideals of 
men who never spent time in reflecting rationally on matters 
of earthly and human importance, but instead on monstrous 
and fabulous problems, on the solution of absolutely futile and 
inane questions ? If Dante had at least tried to show us the 
beauty of a life devoted to important study and noble eleva- 
tion of spirit and relief of one's fellow creatures; if he had 
conjured before us images of figures who sought to develop 
their own abilities, who sought not after too much theology, 
who were not afraid of daring speculation, we would have 
hearkened to him. 

He cannot forget his scholastic philosophy ; he loves theology 
more than art. It will be noticed that he is always greatest 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 39 

where he is least dogmatic; he is inevitably inartistic and 
sterile when his theories absorb him. Many of the charac- 
ters he meets spoil their tales by giving expression to a tenet 
of Aquinas. They are often mere mouthpieces for the solu- 
tion of some petty question that puzzles the poet. He is the 
defender of almost every idea against whose truth thinkers 
and writers of merit fought before and after him. He would 
have placed in hell and excluded from heaven, almost every 
really great man of artistic power and intellectual attainments 
who has ever lived. He judges rather than studies, he asserts 
rather than explains. 

He troubles us with political questions that have long lost 
their value. We to-day do not find any interest in the theories 
that divided the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, except from a 
historical point of view. We do not care about the strife 
between the pope and emperor, about the theory whether the 
emperor holds directly from God as the Ghibellines and Dante 
with them maintained. We believe that no one gets his power 
by divine right. The poet's political views are introduced 
often and form the basis of many of his judgments. Though 
we cannot expect him to give even a passing thought to the 
theory of democracy, the fact is that the political theories in 
the poem help in making much of it as obsolete as does the 
theological intent. 

Again there is entirely too much local history in the Divine 
Comedy to give it universal significance. The dissensions, 
the contemporary and petty affairs that figure constantly, 
detract from the emotional appeal of the poem. The endless 
obscure names of the catalogues of murders must be read 
with a history of the times in hand. Unfortunately most of 
Dante's historical narration is not lit up with the profound 



40 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

reflections or picturesqueness such as we find in some of the 
great histories of the world's literature. A poem that seeks 
for permanence should rise above the discords of the poet's 
town and should be free from, partisanship and prejudice. 

The critics of Dante are usually of two kinds. Those who 
come to him for intellectual nourishment are generally those 
who are antagonistic to free thought. They have been, it 
may be added, the best students of the poet and have inter- 
preted him best, because they have found much that is still 
true for them in the comedy. They naturally find their own 
souls mirrored here and one cannot quarrel with them for 
their admiration. One should first dispute with them the 
truth of the theories they maintain. But there are other 
critics who accept none of Dante's ideas but look upon him 
as a painter and poet who has an excellent command of the 
language and a magical power of expression. They see the 
greatness of the epic in the fine similes and brief descriptions 
both of which in most cases take up a few lines. But can we 
look upon Dante as a world poet for this alone ? Many writers 
of our day are finer literary artists than he. As a matter of 
fact many novelists who have no universal significance have 
surpassed him in descriptive powers. .^Esthetic critics of 
Dante forget that it was not his similes and descriptions that 
first brought the poet fame, that it was his theories and ideas 
which were first regarded as his real distinction. 

Countless essays and books have been written on questions 
raised by the poem that have no value or importance. If 
some one could but make a list of the problems aroused by 
Dante we would have an excellent example of the useless 
learning often wasted on classics. But we wish our poem to 
be both of aesthetic and intellectual value and not a means of 



DxInte: The Divine Comedy 41 

studying mythology, geography, pseudo-science, theology and 
history. The commentators have written essays and books 
to decide whether Beatrice was a real woman or only repre- 
sented theology, whether her rebuke to Dante was for his 
heresy or immorality; whether she foretold the coming of 
Luther, whether she was married or not. They have specu- 
lated on the question whether the allegory was political, relig- 
ious or moral in its intent; they have fought about the extent 
of the poet's Catholicism and have even found him very liberal. 
They have been divided as to whether there was an analogy 
between the scheme of the purifications of the seven sins in 
purgatory and the punishment of the crimes and sins in the 
nine circles of hell. The poet's minor allegories and his 
fabulous creatures have all been given significance. 

There is not a single character who is a hero because he 
championed advanced ideas. There is not the slightest refer- 
ence to the conflicts which man has with institutions that 
harm him; nay, these institutions are held up before us as 
beacon lights. There is not a passage that considers from a 
broad view-point any of the problems of man's relation to the 
universe at large. Expression is not given to the emotions 
that we all know, in our voyage through life. The poet 
does not dwell on the sadness of man's position in the hands 
of destiny, or the calamities brought about by poverty or ignor- 
ance. He is an enemy to freedom, to toleration. He has not 
shown us any sympathy with an individualist. 

The poet was behind his own times. He had courage in 
condemning abuses, but after all he attacked flagrantly appar- 
ent misdeeds. He assailed a few kings and popes, but popery 
and monarchy were ideal institutions to him. He sided with 
the majority in all matters. He did not quaff from the foun- 



42 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

tain of which all the great intellectual leaders of the Kenais- 
sance drank; the few ancient authors whom he read had no 
broadening effect upon him; he read his own religion into 
them. Can any one imagine the pagan Virgil speaking thus 
like a theologian. " Mad is he who hopes that our reason 
can traverse the infinite way which One Substance in Three 
Persons holds. Be content, human race, with the quia 
(i. e., with the existence of a thing rather than the cause of its 
existence) ; for if you had been able to see everything, there 
had been no need for Mary to bear child." Virgil is supposed 
to represent reason, but he is made the mouthpiece of the 
most unreasonable statements. Never has a poet been more 
distorted and perverted by a disciple than has poor Virgil at 
the hands of Dante. It is really not Virgil who is speaking 
but Aquinas himself; it just pleases the Italian to call the 
speaker by the name of Virgil. 

Had there been no other writers of the poet's time who had 
escaped from the bondage of asceticism and dogma, from the 
belief in revelation and the supernatural, we might not censure 
him and would attribute his errors to his times. But those 
times were a period in which these ideas were losing the great 
sway that they wielded in other ages. And Dante was not , 
one of the elect who held up before humanity higher ideals. 
He might have been pardoned for having written his poem 
a few centuries earlier, but not for having sent out such a 
product of superstition at the dawning of an enlightened age. 

One of the leading defects of Dante as a thinker and hence as 
a judge in moral matters is his uncompromising and undeviat- 
ing adherence to the doctrine of free will. He has not the 
slightest doubt as to the power of man to control every move 
of his body, every inclination of his soul, every tendency of his 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 43 

mind, every humor of his temperament. He does not see the 
slightest virtue in the theory of determinism which shows that 
man often is but a puppet for whom the wires have already 
been pulled to play his part here. He does not consider that 
often we are the victims of heredity, of environment, of cir- 
cumstances. A Jean Valjean would have repelled him. He 
believes that man has been made evil by his rulers, by the fact 
that the pope and emperor did not govern independently in 
spiritual and temporal affairs respectively. Hence the poet 
can give us no plausible views on the subject of good and evil ; 
he does not measure them by the amount of pain they bring; 
he does not derive them wholly from the presence of the moral 
sense in man ; he does not weigh them properly in connection 
with the rest of the universe or show that they are but human 
conceptions. We therefore can expect very little sympathy 
for a wrong-doer from Dante ; we only find it in cases where he 
knew personally some of the sufferers. He does not divide the 
goats from the sheep ; all sinners of one species are hustled 
together; if he ever excepts some one it is because some one 
prayed for him. 

Dante sums up the leading ideas of the medieval ages in his 
•poem. As a compendium of ethics, religion and philosophy 
of the popular kind which prevailed in the dark times before 
the Eenaissance, it may merit study by those interested. As 
a living poem most of it is hopeless. All we find in it are a 
few episodes that might have been written independently. We 
are not concerned about what is going on in his heaven or hell, 
but are interested in the speeches of some characters who 
related what went on in this world. If the poet could but 
come back to life and see that we discard the so-called truths 
that he taught and that we linger over some of the tales colored 
4 



44 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

by emotion, he no doubt would think we were laying stress on 
the secondary portions of the poem. He would probably claim 
that these stories were incidental or illustrative, but were not 
the raison d'etre of the poem. 

What a spectacle of a poet trying to give us the last word on 
human wisdom, and we allow our childish fancy to revel in 
some idle tales in the poem ! What an ironical situation it is 
when we dismiss the passages meant to save our souls and pay 
most attention to a story of adultery in the poem ! Behold 
Dante striving to win us to heaven, and we instead ponder 
on his exile, his anger, his sorrow. As a moralist who would 
redeem us we find him useless and instead we find enjoyment 
in those passages barren of ideas, but telling of simple events 
like the meeting of one poet with another. It is a strange fate 
that some poets undergo and yet very justly so. Can one 
conceive of Dante's indignation on discovering a fine critic 
like John Addington Symonds ignoring the weighty philosoph- 
ical discourses and explanations of the universe in the poem 
and waxing enthusiastic over a simile ? If a poet would teach, 
and gives us the poorest intellectual product of the time, this 
is the fate he deserves. Great ideas that remain true for ages, 
couched in artistic style and lit up with emotion, will not surfer 
the fate that much of Dante's poem has experienced. 

When the reader of the future thinks of Dante's poem it 
may be as a medieval literary product in which have been 
imbedded several literary jewels like the stories of Francesca, 
Count Ugolino, the Apostrophe to Italy, the account of the 
examples of pride sculptured on the rock and of humility 
engraven on the pavement in the first ledge of purgatory, the 
prophecy of Cacciaguida and probably another half dozen 
episodes. These will be all that is left of the poem. A very 



Dante: The Divine Comedy 45 

small residuum, the reader will say for a poet rated so high. 
But Dante has left some other poems and a few passages of 
excellent prose, though also an obsolete political treatise. His 
figure with the hatchet face and sharp features weighed in 
grief, wandering about in exile and refusing to return to his 
native city under humiliating conditions will always live. As 
a type and personality of his time he will interest us. As a 
world poet his position ought to decline. But a poet he will 
essentially remain. 



MILTON: PAEADISE LOST 

Paradise Lost holds the distinction of being the greatest 
narrative poem in the English language. It is a tale of the 
origin and history of all of man's misfortunes ; it also attempts 
a solution of them. It treats of the creation of the universe, 
of the justice of God, of the origin of evil ; it offers an explana- 
tion of the theory of free will. Its leading characters are 
supernatural or mythical beings in whose existence the poet 
believed; its scenes of action range throughout the entire 
universe. There are descriptions of battles between devils 
and angels, which of course never took place ; there is the tale 
of how Paradise, the garden of Eden, was lost, although it 
never existed; there is the mournful event of how human 
nature lost its perfection, which it certainly never possessed. 

Let us examine the poem and see how much of it remains 
vital, poetic and profound to-day. Let us note what effect 
the growth of advanced ideas in science and philosophy has 
made upon our critical judgment of it as a work of art. We 
know that most of the axiomatic ideas in the sphere of thought 
to-day are just the reverse of the views that Milton enter- 
tained. The chief difficulty that we find with the poem is 
that it is built upon a theological system that is false and 
upon a demonology that is monstrous. We shall discover that 
the poem is vitiated by the presence of the Ptolemaic system 
of astromony, which the poet deliberately chose for his purpose 
though he knew the Copernican system was the true one; we 
shall be irritated by intricate studies of supernatural creatures ; 
we shall be wearied with pedantic and bookish learning; we 
shall be in the mazes of infelicitous secondary allegories; 



r 



48 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

above all we shall learn that the central ideas of the poem are 
fabrications unworthy of being the foundations of a literary 
performance. Yet we shall find a sublimity and majesty of 
style, and an excellently drawn portrait of Satan. We shall 
read beautiful descriptions, find our intellects and emotions 
stirred by a few speeches ; and shall note great narrative powers 
displayed here and there. 

Critics always warn us that in reading the poem we should 
for the time being forget that we are in the midst of mythology, 
and that we should suppose the story to be true. But we 
cannot resist the promptings of our feelings. Our sense of 
truth is offended; we find the absurdities too palpable; all 
laws of probability are defied; the inconsistencies are too 
numerous. We become bewildered by the mythological 
machinery. We cannot follow Lucifer in his peregrinations 
throughout the universe. We are confused by the dividing 
up of heaven and hell and cannot conceive of the events taking 
place therein which the poet describes. We inevitably find 
ourselves subjecting the fiends to the laws of nature, and pain- 
fully struggle with our imaginations in making ourselves 
believe that they can subsist in vacuity. We who wish to know 
more of human events on our planet cannot stir up interest 
in supernatural events in chaos. We also cannot forget that 
the poet simply commentated upon the first few chapters of 
the Bible ; that he took seriously some legends whose truth no 
one would seriously defend to-day and which were disregarded 
by thinkers even in ancient times. He spoils the tales by 
adding a tissue of irrelevent foreign matter read into them by 
theologians, such as the story of the devil entering the serpent, 
the battle of Cod with Lucifer who is trying to take revenge 
on God, and the sin of Adam demanding atonement by the 
death of God's son. 



Milton - : Paeadise Lost 49 

The most famous books of the poem are the first two. Here 
there is little or no theology; here we are not yet troubled 
with those two inconceivable individuals, Adam and Eve. 
We have the picture of a defeated general, even though the 
poet does call him Lucifer. Many critics regard these two 
books of the poem as the only ones in it deserving of enduring 
fame. The secret of their greatness is in the speeches scat- 
tered through them. Milton who intended to justify the ways 
of God towards man and show us the cause of all our woes, 
is remembered for some speeches of his devils which are good 
because of their wordly wisdom. No doubt even these speeches 
have been overestimated, and the frequency with which they 
have been quoted has made them somewhat commonplace. 
But they are real literature and time has not as yet made them 
obsolete. The very first speech of Satan makes us admire 
his dauntlessness, his noble arrogance, his determination never 
to yield. We think of him as of a defeated human being and 
forget that his battle is supposed to have taken place with 
God; we retain in our memories those words about the uncon- 
querable will not being lost. Then we feel sorry for him 
when he contrasts hell with the place he had lost. And we 
have his well-known reflection about a mind being able to 
make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven; and his policy 
" better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven." There are 
about seven speeches in each of these opening two books and 
most of their contents brim over with expedient, non-moral, 
Machiavellian plans. The spirits seek a goal and will allow 
nothing to hinder them. When they resolve, as the archangel 
advises them, on war " open or understood/' and to work by 
fraud what force cannot effect, somehow or other we are not 
repelled by the insidiousness of the scheme planned. 



50 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

The speeches in the second book might have been spoken at 
a gathering of defeated chiefs who are deliberating whether 
to continue the war, sue for peace, or retreat altogether. We 
have the passions of revenge and hatred shown in these mono- 
logues and the character of each rebel angel shows itself. 
These devils have fine intellects, and utter thoughts naturally 
suggested by the circumstances. We admire them all, Moloch 
with his vindictive nature, and Belial with his common sense 
about the futility of further resistance in the face of the 
impossible. We are even more impressed by the suggestion 
of Mammon to make the best of the present situation and get 
accustomed to it. As a matter of fact every speaker is con- 
vincing. When we finish these speeches and turn to the other 
portions of the two books the contrast is great. 

We have the pedantic and absurd descriptions which make 
us remember that the rebel angels are not human, though we 
were being led to believe so from the human reasoning in the 
speeches. No, we do not care for the picture where Satan 
and his crew lie in hell. The place is not real, the tortures 
never occurred, everything is incongruous. We are not im- 
pressed by the picture of Satan chained to the burning lake. 
All the pedantic comparisons which the image of the arch- 
fiend arouses in the poet's mind are ludicrous and have been 
unfairly admired. We have the simile about the Leviathan 
who is often mistaken for an island, whom Satan resembles. 
There is the description of Satan's shield, which is compared 
to the moon and then Galileo's name is drawn in because he 
had perfected the telescope. What would we to-day think of 
a poet who used the sun in a simile and then brought in the 
name of Kirchoff because he had invented the spectroscope? 
The host of Satan reminds the poet of autumn leaves in 



Miltox: Paradise Lost 51 

Vallambrosa, then of the reeds on the coast of the Dead Sea, 
the name of which evokes the story of Pharaoh and the 
Children of Israel. As the angels rise and fly the density of 
the swarm is brought home to us by reference to Moses's locusts, 
and the number of the spirits is suggested to us by mention 
of the invasions of Eome by the Goths, Huns and Vandals. 
The army of the angels was such as to put to shame the largest 
forces in the annals of the world; even all the knights who 
jested at Aspramont and Montalbron, and elsewhere were 
mere pygmies compared to them. 

Milton reaches the climax of pedantry and inartistic writing 
when, imitating Homer, he gives us a catalogue of the names 
of the leaders of the host. By some strange metamorphosis 
these angels are the very heathen gods whom later the nations 
in and about Palestine worshipped. Every god is tagged and 
described by his various surnames; the extent of his earthly 
jurisdiction is also given. The counts in the bills of indict- 
ment consist of the leading crimes of which he was guilty later 
in the course of his earthly career. This little band whose 
whole combined realms occupied a very small piece of land, 
defied the Creator of the universe. 

There is too much of the school-room in Milton's poem. 
He is always being reminded that such and such an event in 
hell bears a resemblance to some historical event that took 
place later on this earth. He displays his scientific knowl- 
edge, his information in mythology, his theological studies. 
When he describes the rising of Pandemonium, the palace 
where the angels are to sit in counsel, he does it with his 
usual pedantry. 

But the poet also moralizes and badly, in these two opening- 
books. There is the immoral assertion that tells us God 



52 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

allowed Satan to proceed to commit crimes in order that he 
might heap up damnation for himself. We are warned not 
to be surprised that riches grow in hell, for that soil may best 
deserve that precious bane. 

While Satan is going to explore this world and try to lure 
man from the right path, as this was what the spirits had 
decided to do in order to be revenged upon the Almighty, the 
other angels amuse themselves in his absence. The whole 
picture is ludicrous; they are supposed to be suffering with 
fire and yet they can sit there and discuss freewill and provi- 
dence, or play the harp; some compete in racing, others for 
amusement tear up hills and rocks or go out exploring hell. 
Milton knew his Homer and he reproduces scenes here from 
the Greek poet's mythology. The chief thing that can be said 
in extenuation of this whole scene is that we are at least saved 
the torturing scenes we find in Dante. No character in hell, 
human or diabolic could think of amusement in playing a 
harp. 

The lengthy allegory of the birth of death through Satan's 
sexual relations with sin, and then of the incestuous relation 
of death with the latter, its own mother, is repulsive. The 
account of the hell-hounds begotten by death creeping into 
the womb of their mother sin is nauseating. The story is 
unconvincing and seeks to show us that sin brought death 
into the world, and that Satan was originally responsible. 
However one wonders why sin is made by God to be the por- 
tress at the gate, when He knew that she would give Satan 
the key. 

We have pointed out some of the merits and faults of the 
two first books of the poem. Thus far in spite of some good 
speeches and the sublime style here and there it does not appear 



Milton: Pakadise Lost 53 

that the poem ought to rank very high. As yet little of Milton 
the religions thinker and sensuous poet has appeared. We 
shall have him in these two roles in other parts of the poem. 
We shall find more Miltonian descriptions and more pedantry 
and puerility. But we have seen him in his highest role, the 
creator of the character of Lucifer, who has some dignified 
traits. 

The other book of the poem that ranks high with many 
critics is the ninth. Here we really have the story of the 
temptation of Adam and Eve, their succumbing thereto and 
their downfall; the action and substance of the poem. 

We cannot immediately resist thinking that a poet who 
teaches that the eating of an apple was the cause of the greatest 
misery that ever afflicted humanity has chosen a wretched and 
trite theme for a great poem. The story is too trivial to us 
to penetrate into the allegory behind it. Yet from the start 
the poet is impressed with the greatness of his theme which 
he tells us he thinks much more heroic than the idea of 
revenge that prompted Achilles to fight on account of the 
death of his friend. 

The arguments between Adam and Eve who wishes to work 
alone in another part of the garden are commonplace. Adam 
cannot persuade her to remain by his side even though he 
discourses about free will. Then Satan disguised as a serpent 
finds her and is almost moved not to prosecute his aim by the 
sight of her beauty. He flatters her and uses fraud. He 
pretends that he is able to speak because he had eaten of the 
tree of knowledge. He explains to her that she will not die 
by eating of the forbidden fruit; he ate and lived to tell the 
tale. Eve eats and immediately her intellectual powers grow. 
Where before she was in absolute ignorance she now possesses 



54 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

supreme wisdom. We cannot appreciate this sudden change 
in her. We have never been in her situation ; our own knowl- 
edge is a matter of gradual growth and we have not been 
placed in a condition wherein from almost total insensibility 
we sprang instantly into the possession of a great intellect. 
It would be as if an infant suddenly became a philosopher. 
So she is not undergoing a transformation that we have ever 
experienced. 

The entire dialogue between Satan and Eve has been entirely 
over-praised. Eve's arguments reek with silliness. She does 
not give any reason for refusing to eat except that she was 
forbidden to do so ; she believes that she will die for no reason 
but because she had eaten. After Eve makes Adam eat, fear- 
ing that in case she died he would wed another Eve who does 
not even appear on the horizon, they both begin to have all the 
passions natural to human beings, shame, remorse, suspicion, 
anger, mistrust, hate and love. We do not find ourselves 
depicted here, for we were never without feeling or the capacity 
for passion and then discovered them suddenly in ourselves. 
It is as if two statues had suddenly come to life. We cannot 
sympathise with people who suddenly received all the human 
faculties, for we have never been without these. Whatever 
instincts and emotions we possess have evolved in the growth 
of the human race ; no one has received them suddenly. 

At first Adam and Eve could not distinguish between good 
and evil but after having eating the apple they can do so. 
How they receive this power we are not told any more than 
why they were forbidden to acquire it. There is no reason 
given why they should not have eaten the fruit. But why 
have the tree growing in the garden where they may always 
succumb to temptation? The final impression that Milton 



Milton - : Pakadise Lost 55 

unwittingly gives us is that God Himself is responsible for 
their calamities. If He made man without strength of will, 
and knew that he would not exercise his will power, why did 
He let man decide his own fatal destiny? 

When we read a story of temptation and fall, trailing dire 
disaster, we have the right to expect that these calamities will 
be the natural consequences of succumbing. A person may 
seek inordinate fame or illegal love, or ill-gotten wealth and 
hence lay in store for himself griefs that he might have natur- 
ally anticipated from his quest, but we cannot perceive how eat- 
ing an apple will bring about all the disasters of mankind. No 
allegorical interpretation can save the situation. 

The rest of the poem is, with the exception of a few addi- 
tional speeches and descriptions obsolete. In fact there are 
many sections that are notorious as illustrating the low level 
occasionally reached by a sublime poet. There are whole books 
that are scarcely redeemed by any virtues whatsoever. They 
abound in antiquated science, astronomy, theology. They set 
forth conceptions borrowed from mythology, they paraphrase 
chapters of the Bible, they invariably mistake falsehood for 
truth, ugliness for beauty. They incorporate Milton's politi- 
cal and religious views, now no longer tenable. Scarcely any 
topic of human interest is touched upon. 

For instance four successive books of the poem, the fifth 
to the eighth inclusive, may be dismissed almost in toto. 
They are occupied by conversations between Adam and the 
angel Eaphael who tells him of the war in heaven between 
God and the rebel angels, and Christ's victory over them ; then 
the creation of the world in six days is described. The angel 
had been advised by God to go down and tell Adam about the 
plot of Satan. Eaphael's account of the physiology of angels 



56 Dante and Othek Waning Classics 

and of their digestive process is about as preposterous as Adam's 
philosophical explanation to Eve of the cause of dreams. 

We also hear from Eaphael how God begot a son to whom 
all the angels had to bow. One finds the son out of place 
here in heaven before the time when he was to go down in the 
world to preach his sermon on the mount. There is no men- 
tion of him in the opening chapters of the Bible, although 
theologians and commentators have read his name into these 
sections as they have done also in the love poem called " The 
Song of Songs " and other parts of the Old Testament. We 
are not interested in knowing why he was created after instead 
of before the angels, although we would like to know why God 
delegated many tasks to His son, such as sending him out to 
rout the rebel angels. The son is described as riding on a 
chariot, convoyed by cherubim with four faces and bodies set 
with eyes. Fires flashed, smoke belched, ten thousand saints 
followed. The son had a bow and arrow to cast lightning, 
and his ensign blazed. Later the son helps create the uni- 
verse for God, having circumscribed it with a golden compass. 
We found the same son in the third book discussing theology 
with God, and we must confess we are not overwhelmed by 
his heroism when he offers to die for man. He is a colorless 
character. Milton failed here completely for the son bears 
resemblance neither to a human being nor a god; he is not 
subject to passion, yet he is not free from the possibility of 
death. 

The reader is always wondering why God allowed the rebel 
angels to rebel, since He is omnipotent. Still we find that He 
even suggests that He might lose Heaven; and He also dis- 
plays lack of dignity in the derisive attitude he maintains 
towards Satan. We continue to wade through the story which 



Milton : Paeadise Lost 57 

the angel Baphael is telling to Adam. He shows tis how the 
angel Abdiel refused to join the rebellious forces, combating 
Satan with commonplace arguments and rebukes. Satan 
replies in a speech showing his usual intellectual powers. 

The story of the war in heaven occupies the sixth book. 
Naturally most of it is reminiscent of the wars of Cromwell. 
The bringing of cannon into heaven has always been the 
subject of much ridicule. The conception of angels and devils 
fighting like human beings is in itself ludicrous, but it is made 
infinitely more so by the use of military engines borrowed 
from man. Michael and Gabriel are sent out to lead the 
armies of God. Abdiel indulges in some preliminary ranting 
and thinks that he defeats Satan by words. The battle now 
rages and Satan and Michael meet in combat; the former is 
wounded and howls with pain, but the wound heals up for 
angels can only die by being annihilated; they cannot be 
mortally wounded. Satan invented the cannons after his first 
day's defeat, and the angels are temporarily thrown into con- 
fusion, but soon they tear up mountains and hills which they 
throw at the devils. The mountain throwing scene is usually 
passed over by Miltonians out of charity for their bard. It 
is at this stage that the son comes to the rescue. He drives 
the devils out of heaven with his thundering. He did not seek 
to annihilate them but to root them out of heaven and drive 
them into hell. But why should he not have exterminated 
them and saved the human race all its troubles, and also thus 
kept himself from dying for it? Why didn't the Almighty 
make the rebel angels respect His son before compelling the 
latter to defeat them ? Why did the battle have to last three 
days and why didn't God Himself fight ? Above all how did 
the narrating angel get hold of a copy of some of the world's 
epic poems to assist him in describing these wars ? 



r 



58 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

After telling of the wars, Baphael describes how the world 
was created in seven days. He uses the language of the first 
chapter of the Bible and adds to and embellishes it. He is 
also quite an astronomer, hut everything he says on this theme 
is out of date for us, because we know it is all neither science 
nor literature. We are aware that the theories of modern 
geology and evolution were not known in those days and we do 
not quarrel with Milton for his hopeless science, even though 
some of the Greek philosophers knew more about the subject 
than he did. 

The story of Adam's creation as he tells it to the angel does 
not move us. We do not comprehend a situation where a 
man is born in the adult stage with all his faculties upon him 
and immediately gets an instantaneous impression of the 
novelty of the scenes before him. We cannot appreciate his 
feelings when for the first time he finds himself confronted 
with life. We ourselves get the impress of earthly things 
gradually by a long process. We have judged the world with 
the imagination of a child and the vision of a boy and the 
reflection of a man. We do not recall our first complete sight 
of the universe ; we have never burst out into the full contem- 
plation of life the instant after we had been in oblivion. 

Then the whole scene where Adam suggests to God that he 
wants a wife is ridiculous. Imagine God joking and telling 
Adam that He has no wife, although we know He has a son ; 
imagine the Supreme Being acting like a teasing papa who is 
asked by his child for a toy. The poet's sense of humor was 
not highly developed. But God admits that Adam is right, 
the animals were created with mates, why not he? So the 
creation of the woman from Adam's rib takes place and the 
first love affair in the world is begun. The angel hearing 



Milton: Paeadise Lost 59 

Adam's story attacks the ravages of passion but adds that 
angels also love. We look in vain for a description of the 
feelings displayed by lovers when they first meet. There is 
nothing in the situation that has any human interest, because 
we have not met our Eves in this way. The whole story of 
the creation of man and woman and the universe is anything 
but literature. 

There are two famous conceptions in the poem that have 
become well known through the sheer folly that Milton dis- 
played in creating them, that of the Fool's Paradise in the 
third book and of the bridge built by sin and death connecting 
earth and hell, in the tenth book. The first region contains 
Catholics, seekers of fame and some philosophers and giants. 
The bridge built by sin and death over which Satan sends the 
two engineers down to the earth is a direct result of the eating 
of the apple. God sees sin and death take possession of the 
earth and gives a very poor reason for allowing them to do so. 
But he does so because he wishes that the filth caused by man's 
sin may be licked up and that the son may have an opportunity 
of flinging both of the malefactors out of the earth. However 
the angels sing that God's decrees are just, although we wonder 
why He did not interfere and save the world so much pain and 
spare His son's dying to save man. We also cannot help 
smiling at Milton's implicit belief that great calamities have 
afflicted the world because of Adam's sin. The seasons 
changed, the winds blew so that spring should not smile 
perpetually, the animals began to devour one another; all 
because of the eating of the apple. None of these catastrophes 
ever took place before, according to the poet. We cannot 
enter into the spirit of the allegory simply because we know 
there never was any connection between any deed of man 
6 



60 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

and the changes in seasons or butchery of one another among 
animals ; for these events took place long before man came. 

There is nothing more cruel in the poem than the kaleido- 
scope of future calamities that is shown to Adam and Eve by 
the Angel Michael. Adam faces the horror of seeing all the 
troubles of the world that he has caused. The consolation 
that he gets is that the son will set everything right. The 
image of death is shown to him so vividly that there can be no 
possibility of his forgetting it. He sees one of his own sons 
kill the other, who rolls in the dust and blood. Moreover the 
generous angel shows Adam a lazar-house where he sees all 
the afflictions that are to kill his children, madness, epilepsy, 
ulcers, colic, atrophy. Then he is forced to utter a real rea- 
sonable and rebellious sentiment. Why is life given to him 
to be taken away thus? Who would not refuse to accept life 
or give it up if he knew what was to face him ? 

No doubt one of the most effective sections of the whole 
poem is the last third of the tenth book where we have Adam's 
lament for his fate, and his quarrel and reconciliation with Eve. 
For once they become actual human beings with passions and 
despair. Adam's lament is rich in intellectual display and 
emotion. We have the unhappy blind poet speaking here. 
We forget that the lament is about something that never 
happened ; we imagine now that the punishment is real. Why 
did God create us and then allow us to suffer? Why were 
terms made with us in the formation of which we had no share, 
and in the keeping of which we find ourselves hampered? 
The rebuke to Eve is very likely taken from the poet's own 
household, and we are interested in Adam's anti-feminism. 
But soon we see the finer side of his nature after he hears her 
pathetic lament, in which she is the mouthpiece of woman- 



n 



Milton: Paradise Lost 61 

kind. Eve's suggestion of suicide is not entertained by Adam 
and we, are happy to know that they can derive consolation 
from the fact that they will be able to wreak revenge on the 
serpent. One regrets that so much art and passion should 
have been wasted on an imaginary sorrow. But nevertheless 
here Adam is ourselves, and his fears and cries are our own. 

There are several other powerful scenes in the poem, espe- 
cially Satan's address to the sun, and we might add the descrip- 
tion of the Garden of Eden. The latter may surfer somewhat 
because of too many mythological allusions, but we find it 
altogether a good piece of landscape painting. The address 
to the sun might have been spoken by Napoleon at St. Helena. 

But there is so much in the poem that makes it antiquated 
and dull. The Lucifer whom we admired in the first two 
books loses his interest for us. We are amused at the idea 
of his lodging in the sun and of his changing into various 
animals like a toad, a cormorant, a serpent. We yawningly 
observe him escaping Gabriel's watch, only marvelling at the 
stupid angel with shield and helmet, unable to do his duty. 
A messenger must glide down a sunbeam to warn him. We 
look on almost contemptuously at the scene where Satan in 
the form of a toad is speared by the angel's messenger to be 
made to assume his real shape. Satan's debate with Gabriel 
bores us, and we are amused at the poet's conception of God 
hanging up a pair of scales, which show that Satan will be 
defeated in his combat with Gabriel. We rail at the criminal 
negligence of the angel in deliberately allowing Satan to 
escape, but this had to be done to help Milton's scheme. And 
God is presumed to be looking on and does not hinder the 
arch-angel's escape. When Lucifer accomplishes his mission 
and returns to tell the other devils of his success we are not 



62 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

frightened when they turn into horrible serpents and attempt 
to eat of the fruit of the tree which turns into ashes in their 
mouths. No, we merely say to ourselves, that the poet can 
become very grotesque. 

Thus we might continue pointing out dead matter in the 
poem. The dialogues in Heaven between God and the son, 
occupying the first half of the third book are examples of 
God as schoolmaster in theology. Then there is Adam's 
explanation to Eve that the stars shine at night because total 
darkness might regain the world and extinguish all living 
things, and also because millions of spiritual creatures walk the 
earth unseen and need the light. Nor do we care to have 
from a writer who gave us some excellent tracts in defence of 
divorce for incompatibility of temperament the commonplace 
apology for the wedded love of the pair, and the address to 
matrimony. And we are not impressed with the story of her 
creation which Eve narrates to Adam and which is overheard 
by the serpent. Nor does the account of her falling in love 
with Adam move us. She had never seen nor heard of a man 
before and hence had no passion, so we do not feel there is 
any merit in her story of the birth of love in her soul. No 
woman ever found herself suddenly created and suddenly facing 
a man. No man ever courted a woman as Adam did Eve. 

That Milton took this apple eating seriously is proved by a 
prose work of his which was discovered about a century ago. 
In the volume he says that eating the apple was the greatest 
crime because it was a transgression of the whole law. It 
included ingratitude, disobedience, gluttony, parricide, theft, 
sacrilege, deceit, lust, irreligiousness, pride, etc. Adam com- 
mitted all these crimes when he ate the apple. The poet 
says that some particular act in itself indifferent had to be 



Milton: Paeadise Lost 63 

forbidden to test man. But some deed in itself wrong and 
carrying within itself the seeds of its destructive powers would 
have served better as a theme for a poet. If Adam had been 
forbidden to commit a crime and he was disobedient, we would 
have been able to appreciate the consequences of his conduct 
and the poem would have carried a stronger lesson. 

The poet never succeeded in proving his main theme. God 
knew beforehand that Adam was going to eat the fruit of the 
tree, and hence be the cause of sin and death. Yet He allowed 
him to do so, and did not hinder him and the poet thinks he has 
justified the ways of God to man because God made man's will 
free. It was man's fault if he could not exercise his will- 
power. But God might have made man's will stronger; it 
would not have involved any additional difficulty for Him. 
God sees the greatest evil impending and instead of averting 
it, allows the most frightful calamity to pursue man. Why 
did not God undo Satan's work immediately? He should 
have done more than merely send the angel Eaphael to warn 
Adam. He should not have permitted the watchman angel 
to allow Satan to gain an entrance to this world. He should 
not have allowed Adam and Eve to separate for thus Eve fell 
a prey to the wily serpent. The poet has not succeeded in 
showing God's justice ; he attempts to defend it only by futile 
theological discourses. 

Nor does the poet show us God's goodness, which consists 
in allowing His only begotten son to die for us. First, history 
has shown that calamities have harassed even those who fol- 
lowed closely in the son's footsteps, that great religious wars, 
massacres, persecutions, have troubled those who accepted the 
son. Secondly, since many horrors spread over the earth before 
the son came, why did he wait thousands of years and not 



64 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

save man sooner? Why, besides, should God show Himself 
such a poor father as to allow His son to die, even though the 
latter gladly offered himself up. Thirdly, many of us believe 
that the death of no one can save the entire race. And then 
there are people who believe that this son of God was simply 
a human being, the son of a carpenter, and that his real virtue 
is that he tried to spread a pure though unpractical morality 
among men. No, we do not find God's goodness in the poem, 
when we see that after all Satan triumphed; he accomplished 
his end; he brought about his object to ruin humanity, he 
brought death and sin into the world; in short he worked 
revenge on God and is the victor. He has never been put out 
of commission and has continued to work evil down to this day. 
The only thing that God did was to promise redemption by 
the death of the savior. But Lucifer accomplished far more 
evil than the good that was to be brought by God's son. Mil- 
ton's God was a miserable bungler; he lost out on the whole 
and must resort to apologies and promises. 

The moral views to be extracted from the poem amount to 
the trite advice not to be disobedient, even when you are not 
given a reason for submission. Milton who fought against 
authority and defended the murderer of a king, who cham- 
pioned the liberty of the unlicensed press and the liberation 
of the marriage ties, in this poem is the defender of authority, 
the enemy of freedom. The poet was himself a rebel who sang 
the praises of subordination. But no definite lessons are 
really taught us; we simply understand that the poet means 
we should spurn Satan and follow Christ; or avoid evil and 
pursue virtue; and this is really vague, for he does not show 
a profound perception into the nature of either. 



Milton: Paeadise Lost 65 

He offers us no consolation but repentance. He is not 
impressed by any other duty in life, but the expiation of sin. 
He attacks ambition ; while Dante at least placed the ambitious 
in heaven, Milton puts them in the Fool's Paradise; yet he 
himself was ambitious. He does not speak highly of love or 
woman in the poem; we know that he thought of his own 
domestic misfortunes when he drew Eve. 

Professor George E. Woodberry has pointed out a radical 
defect in Paradise Lost, namely that there is a denial of prog- 
ress in it ; the idea of the poem is one of restoration to a former 
state than that of revolution. The epic becomes one of the 
" damnation of things, in which the fact of final partial 
restoration is present as an intention and promise only. There 
is what makes it a poem of past time, and removes it far from 
the modern mind." And this is true. There is really no hope 
but an angel's promise. Everybody's deed affects some one 
who is innocent. Just because Satan rebelled, Adam had to 
suffer; because Adam sinned death came into the world; 
because Eve ate the apple Adam fell ; because the race suffers 
Christ was to die. Yet there is so much talk of free will and 
we see that each brought consequences against which the will 
was unable to combat. We never want to go back to a former 
state of civilization; we seek to have something different and 
in accordance with our new environment. We would not have 
the early state in which Adam and Eve found themselves 
before Satan came, even if we could. We try to adjust our- 
selves to altering circumstances and are contented if we find 
little struggle in doing so. Development, progress and evolu- 
tion are subjects not touched upon in the poem. 

Milton's borrowings and lack of originality have been 
pointed out by critics and commentators. The theme he 



66 Dante and Other Waning Classics ' 

chose had been handled by contemporary poets whose works 
we know he had read. He borrowed plots and passages and 
imitated other poems rather freely. Students have compiled 
quite a list of poems from which Milton derived copiously. 
We know that he was certainly influenced by the Lucifer of 
Vondel the Dutch poet. Milton also plucked plumes from 
the poets of Greece, Eome and Italy. He is particularly in- 
debted to Homer. He recurs to him again and again; he 
eagerly appropriates similes, episodes and descriptions from the 
Father of Poetry. Yet he derives most from the Bible, in some 
instances reproducing passages almost word for word and line 
for line. He also incorporates arguments from books of theol- 
ogy and draws on scientific works for some of his astronomical 
data. If we were to consider only the original portions of his 
poem, by abstracting the borrowings we should have a produc- 
tion far less bulky than the present form. But it must be 
admitted that few could adorn what they used as Milton did. 
We are all interested in Milton's personality. We know 
the stern champion of English liberty; we sympathise with 
him in his pathetic blindness. We are affected by his domestic 
misfortunes and his disillusionments as a husband and a 
father. We admire his resoluteness and his devotion to his 
ideals. But we must not let alien considerations influence 
us in determining his position as a poet. The time is even 
now at hand when all that remains of his work as a poet are 
some passages from Paradise Lost and a few of his minor 
poems. But what will most likely happen is that his prose 
works will be sifted by critics and we shall have many pages 
of impassioned prose in which he appears not as a theologian 
but as a clear and bold thinker. In no work of his does he 
rise so high as he does in his four treatises where he main- 



Milton: Pakadise Lost 67 

tains opinions on the subject of divorce, which even our 
own time finds too radical. In the Doctrine and Discipline 
of Divorce and in the three pamphlets which followed, he 
wrote from his own experience ; he tried to support his 
ideas by quoting too freely from the Bible, but he gave 
sufficient proof to establish his contention that incompatible 
temperament and contrariety of mind should be grounds for 
divorce. He, the Puritan, is so modern in his views that he 
shocks the liberal mind of to-day. There seems to have been 
a conspiracy of silence among critics to ignore these books of 
Milton, because they do not countenance the conventional 
views of society. Yet the time may come when passages from 
his divorce tracts will be on the lips of all thinking men while 
most of the Paradise Lost may be forgotten. Books dealing 
with so universal a subject, offering a rational solution of 
problems that affect many people are certainly of greater 
utility and even artistic importance than a poem which depicts 
situations that never existed and gives a false interpretation 
of useless questions. 

Milton's fate as a poet bears a certain analogy to that of 
Dante. Paradise Lost achieved its fame because people 
thought it contained a true interpretation of the nature of 
justice, of the origin of evil, of the moral order or disorder 
on this earth. It was presumed to have embodied an unshak- 
able system of theology, an irreproachable scheme of divine 
government, and now that the whole fabric has crumbled, we 
admire the poem because of its grand style. The pious con- 
templated with admiration a work which in their opinion 
summed up the ablest views of life, and to-day people speak 
highly only of the style and rhythm. Milton who was looked 
upon by many as a divine seer who penetrated behind the veil 



68 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

of the mysteries of life is remembered now for his skill in 
ornamenting the English language. He himself had con- 
tempt for the lyricists of his time who turned felicitous 
phrases; yet we like him, as does Matthew Arnold, for his 
" unfailing level of style." He is rich in lines of great beauty 
and power. We rhapsodise over his sublime passages, we are 
elated with his majestic sweep. He is expressive and many 
of his phrases are used by us daily. 

But mastery of style is not enough to give one a place among 
the greatest poets. A world poet's production must appeal 
to us by the universality and truth of the underlying theme; 
it must be of great human interest and lack triviality. It 
should stir our emotions to the very depths, it should seethe 
with penetrating thoughts. There should be in it an " alli- 
ance to great ends " as Pater puts it. 

On the continent Milton never won an exalted position. 
Byron has always held a higher place than he. There are 
several English poets however who have left us finer and more 
enduring poetry than Milton. He unfortunately attached 
himself to dogmas that have since been exploded and the 
ravages made by them in his palace of art have been too great 
and have shaken his position as one of the world's major 
singers. 



BUNYAN: PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 

Pilgrim's Progress has been praised for many reasons. 
First, Christian in his wanderings throngh many dangers, 
trials and temptations to reach the Celestial City is presumed 
to be a type of mankind in search of truth and righteousness. 
The allegory has won admiration because of the vivid pictures 
of scenes where Christian's hardest difficulties took place, such 
as of the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation where 
he fought with Appolyon, the Valley of the Shadow of Death 
and Vanity Fair. It has pleased because of the accounts of 
the pleasant stages in his journey such as the Interpreter's 
House, the Palace Beautiful, Beulah Land and the Celestial 
City itself. It is a work wherein are portrayed characters 
familiar to us all. Some of these are Pliable, Worldly-Wise- 
man, Mr. By-Ends and Great-Heart. Then the narrative 
has also charmed by its simplicity of style. We shall visit 
some of the places through which Christian traveled and 
talk with some of the people he met. We shall also extract 
the lesson taught by the allegory, and shall see what signifi- 
cance if any, Christian has for us. 

Let us first examine the dangerous places through which 
Christian passed. We come to the slough of Despond, but we 
do not fall into it for it is made up of the doubts and fears 
afflicting repentant sinners. Only those who have upon their 
backs the burdens of sins against religion stumble here. We 
do not find ourselves obsessed by the horrible thought that we 
must be saved by following out the mandates of a church ; we 
are satisfied if we do our duty to ourselves and our fellow men, 



70 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

and if we sin, we are willing to take the consequences in the 
natural evils that may follow us for our derelictions. Chris- 
tian's burden is not upon our backs and we do not sink into 
the ditch. Besides it is not the most difficult thing in the 
world to refrain from crime and sin. Bunyan wants to show 
us that to do good is so difficult that we must labor with an 
effort in that direction, and that we must be conscious of sin 
continually. 

So when we find Christian soon engages in the struggle 
with Appolyon who is covered with scales, wings and is belch- 
ing fire and smoke, we say to ourselves : " Now we have never 
fought this monster. He is the same old dragon who is a 
constant figure in medieval literature." We cannot under- 
stand why the dragon should be symbolic of sin against which 
Christian is struggling. We are not even in suspense that 
Christian may be killed. We observe with indifference, and 
incredulity that though his strength is spent he picks up his 
sword and drives Appolyon away. Nor is there any vividness 
in the description of the fight, such as we find in the Faery 
Queen. All that the poet tells us is that the dragon roared 
and that it was the " dreadfulest sight " he ever saw. 

To us the allegory of good conquering evil, or religion fight- 
ing sin by means of a story of a man vanquishing a monster is 
no longer tenable. It does not impress us, it is not beautiful. 
We are not overwhelmed by Christian's arguments with the 
dragon, and his reasons for leading a good life are not satis- 
fying. We do not feel encouraged when Christian tells 
Appolyon that God refuses to help us in order to try us out 
to see if we will not cleave to Him. Moreover we do expect 
deliverance in the present world instead of waiting for the 
judgment day. We have so many more effective examples 



Bunyan: Pilgkim's Peogkess 71 

in literature of struggles between good and evil that we do 
not have to recur to the dragon of our childhood days. We 
have wonderful analyses by writers of struggles within their 
souls and we don't need these conflicts visualized in this form. 

We find the next terrible place through which we have to 
pass with Christian is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. 
We find here the same fires, howlings, ditches, chains, hobgob- 
lins, snakes, mires, that we find in accounts of hell by other 
writers. Thus Bunyan means to show us the horrible side of 
sin, and the inference is that we must pass by all of these v if 
we want to lead a virtuous and religious life. > To us the whole 
thing is repulsive and unconvincing. We are willing to look 
at the Valley and forget about the allegory, but we cannot say 
that real horror is shown here. We think of more powerful 
descriptions we have read, of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, 
dark forests, caves and shipwrecks, besides which Bunyan's 
horrors pale into insignificance. We never were in a valley of 
this kind and we walk through it unharmed and believe that all 
these horrors here must be products of Christian's diseased 
imagination. 

The next obstruction in Christian's way is Vanity Fair. But 
he shuns everything in the fair that pertains to this world. 
He is averse to all forms of pleasure and to material posses- 
sions. He shows us that he will avoid pursuits that men 
usually follow. What a splendid opportunity the author had 
of giving us a vivid realistic description of the fairs as they 
existed in his day. His sole object in describing Vanity 
Fair was to point out to us that the eternal life is more impor- 
tant than the pleasures here. In this part of the allegory 
we have the ascetic author trying to rebuke us because we 
seek pleasures which it is natural for us to pursue; we go 



72 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

with Christian here but we linger and shout at him not to 
hasten, that the city for which he is bound is not any more 
picturesque or alive than this place. Bunyan has unjustly 
peopled his Vanity Fair with innocent tradesmen following 
their natural calling in the company of scoundrels and gam- 
blers. But we find that the chief commodity sold here is the 
ware of Borne and her merchandise. So the fair was really 
described in order to attack Boman Catholicism. 

The redeeming feature of this portion of the story is the 
account of the trial of Faithful and Christian for having 
created a disturbance. 

The sufferings of Christian and Hopeful in the dungeon 
of Doubting Castle belonging to the G-iant Despair are deline- 
ated to warn us away from doubt in the supernatural and the 
dogmas of the church. The lesson is that if we become sceptics 
Despair will urge us also to commit suicide. We should, 
like Christian, escape by using the key of Promise. But we 
find that we can very comfortably put up in this castle and make 
our abode here and not follow Christian any longer. We do 
more than doubt; we know that Christian is wrong in his 
views; we smile at him for having taken the journey; we may 
as well tell him he is pursuing phantoms and that there is 
only one Celestial City and that it is in the midst of the 
so-called City of Destruction. We cannot depend on a man 
who fears investigations by the intellect which are symbolized 
by this castle. We also are annoyed at the conception which 
gives Despair a wife Diffidence with whom he holds counsel 
in bed. 

After we have seen some of the terrible places and experi- 
ences encountered by Christian, we conclude that we have 
never been through them. We may have found it difficult 



Btjnyan: Pilgrim's Progress 73 

to overcome temptation and obstacles, but we feel that after 
all these valleys and castles are not symbolic of our troubles. 
We shall look into some of the more pleasant places in the 
journeys and see if we have ever been in any of them. 

The Interpreter's House was introduced to illustrate some 
theological lessons. There is the picture of the man looking 
upward, his back towards the world, to show Christian " that 
slighting and despising the things that are present" he is 
sure to have glory in the next world for his, reward. The 
picture of the dusty parlor being sprinkled is supposed to 
represent the gospel cleansing original sin. The two children 
Passion and Patience are well contrasted but the story of the 
unfortunate professor who was locked up in the Iron Cage 
for eternity because he loved the pleasure of the world and did 
not follow religious edicts is insufferably poor in conception. 
The poor wretch was even denied repentance by God. And 
those of us who do not have Bunyan's fanatical ideas and do 
not shun life are also apparently to be confined. The descrip- 
tion of the dream of the arrived judgment day is vivid and 
powerful, but fortunately we do not have such fancies. We 
are happy to escape such nightmares as witnessing the open- 
ing of the bottomless pit out of which issued smoke and coals 
of fire. The best scene in the Interpreter's House is the eulogy 
of courage as shown in the man who breaks into the palace. 

When the burden falls off Christian's back at the sight of 
the cross we know that Christian is seeking a life not moral 
so much as religious. He seeks not righteousness but obedi- 
ence to the doctrines of Puritanism ; he is not permeated with 
a spirit of love and interest towards his fellow men, but he 
wishes to make them believe in the supernatural. 



74 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

We observe that in the Palace of the Beautiful, Discretion 
takes care of Christian. Here the pilgrim sees and talks with 
Piety, Charity and Prudence. He offers a very poor explana- 
tion to Charity for deserting his wife and children. He also 
sees weapons that slew the wicked such as David's sling and 
the jawbone used by Samson. In the Delectable Mountains 
Christian was shown the broken pieces of those who were made 
to err " concerning the faith of the resurrection of the body " 
and lay unburied as an example to others. Christian also 
saw blind men walking about the tombs, victims of the Giant 
Despair ; he inspected a byway into hell filled with brimstone, 
and would-be pilgrims who became traitors. He is too much 
entertained by seeing the poor wretches who were dashed into 
pieces because they did not subscribe to the belief in resur- 
rection. 

The description of Beulah Land and the entrance to the 
Celestial City has always won praise, but .even here there is 
lacking such descriptive powers as we find in the great French 
Romanticists. We have the stock in trade objects wherewith 
ancient writers depicted heaven in order to make converts. 
There are the streets paved with gold, the ringing bells, the 
sounding harps and the angels, the trumpeters and so on. 
When Christian and his companion Hopeful cross the river 
wherein they leave their mortal garments, they are reclothed 
and then the Shining Ones describe to them the life of bliss 
that henceforth they will lead. They will wear crowns of gold 
and always see the Holy One ; Him they will praise with shout- 
ing and thanksgiving; they will hear His voice, sit with Him 
when he passes judgment, and partake in the work of damna- 
tion. . One sees immediately that the author's idea of God is 
idolatrous and that this God will allow all who are good Puri- 
tans to sit on the bench with Him. 



■H3SWC- 



Bunyan: Pilgkim's Pkogkess 75 

Most of us have not been in these various places that were 
visited by Christian, nor would want to enter the Celestial 
City described. The ideal sought for is unworthy because the 
author seeks to make us reach it by inculcating in us the most 
fanatical theological doctrines. He depicts to us a goal which 
does not impress us as worthy of attainment. 

Let us now observe some of the people whom Christian meets 
on the way. One will note that the characters whom Bunyan 
would persuade us are the erring ones happen to be the only 
persons who speak with wisdom. Those whom he presents 
to us for our condemnation meet with our approval., His 
heroes bore us, and insult our intelligence. The worldly types 
argue well and are more convincing than Christian. The 
author thinks that Christian is the victor in the debates, but 
he always is in the wrong. The real sensible and human 
types in the book are those who do not reach the Celestial City. 
These characters do not worry about salvation and the judg- 
ment day, and are live men like ourselves, and we take an 
entirely different view-point of them from what the author 
takes. 

We cannot help admiring Obstinate for not being mis- 
guided by Christian and we command Pliable for returning 
home after sinking in the Slough of Despond. He argues 
well. Why should he trouble himself with the pains of a 
journey the nature of which he has already perceived? The 
struggle might be worth while if one is reasonably certain 
that there may be some results, but all that Pliable gets are 
promises. The Worldly- Wiseman is very discerning and re- 
proaches Christian justly for meddling with things too high 
for him. Christian does not heed his advice to go to the 
House of Legality in the Village of Morality, because it is 



76 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

too dangerous to reach on account of a hill ; nevertheless men 
must have laws and moral codes which when founded on liber- 
ality of mind and charity of heart, can assist them greatly. 

Talkative is well drawn. But he does not speak as sensibly 
as the author imagined he did. Bunyan quarrels with him 
because he does not practise what he preaches, and not because 
of what he says. But we feel that Talkative is too steeped in 
error and approve of his not living the life that he considers 
the right one. We are not displeased at Talkative's insin- 
cerity. May all those who think that they ought to pursue 
will-o'-the-wisps thus refrain from doing so ! But neverthe- 
less we have a good portrayal of a religious hypocrite, and 
though he does not utter as many absurdities as Faithful, he 
remains to us a type of the man who talks one way, but acts 
in another. 

By-Ends is admirable for his shrewdness and good common 
sense. His characterization of the Pilgrims strikes one as 
true. They are intolerant and believe that a man must agree 
with them in every detail. Then they are foolishly on their 
journey in all weathers and they want to accomplish every- 
thing immediately. But By-Ends waits for wind and tide, 
takes all advantages in making his life secure ; he thinks of his 
safety and scorns martyrdom. The characters Christian meets 
are wiser than he : he ignores good suggestions and practical 
advice. For instance, why should he not have heeded Demas's 
advice and have digged a little in the silver mine and thus 
have provided himself for life? One wonders how Christian 
subsisted on his journey. There is never a word about his 
desire for food, change of clothing, he does not have to earn 
a livelihood, he is troubled by no human wants; he never has. 
any desire for such diversions as books, art or sport. He is 



Bunyan: Pilgeim's Peogeess 77 

not of this earth and we feel relieved when he reaches his 
haven. 

The dogmatic way in which Christian and Hopeful argue 
with Ignorance is amusing. They flaunt before him such 
vagaries that we sympathise with him. It is refreshing not 
to be versed in all the errors in which they implicitly believe. 
They try to make him feel that he runs a possibility of damna- 
tion. 

The heroes like Evangelist, Faithful, Hopeful and Christian 
himself are lifeless, without passions or rational thoughts. 
They tend to become abstractions, shadowy creatures to illus- 
trate some Biblical texts. They are not moved by the ordi- 
nary things in life, they have not human failings. They 
walk blinded in their own conceit and ignorance, hoping hopes 
forever vain, believing things that will never transpire, seek- 
ing goals that do not exist. Their discourses are but words ; 
they are frenzied in their imagination, hopeless in their rea- 
soning, fanatical and intolerant. They do not so much attack 
abuses in morality as man's refusal to subscribe to their own 
pernicious religious notions. One feels about them as Atheist 
does : " I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take 
upon you so tedious a journey and you are like to have nothing 
but your travel for your pains. " 

The book is really a series of sermons illustrated by alle- 
gory and symbolical characters. At times we have dry dis- 
courses themselves unillumined by metaphor. That we get 
many curious explanations of various matters is a foregone 
conclusion. The central idea running through the book is 
that of the conviction of sin in which we have all been born; 
the corollary is that we must strive for salvation so as not to 
be consigned to hell on the judgment day. Bunyan has re- 



r 



78 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

corded in his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding, a 
pathological document in many respects more interesting 
than his famous allegory, how he came to regard ringing bells, 
dancing and reading romances as wrong. As a matter of fact 
to Bunyan every material desire smacks of sin. If we are 
reposing in the delusion that we are not so sinful after all, he 
seeks to remind us that we are. He seems to love sin, he thinks 
of it all the time, and hunts it out as with a keen sense of 
odor for it. He goes so far as to say that we can have right 
thoughts of God only when we think that He " can see sin in 
us when and where we can see none in ourselves," and that 
even when we have done our best and stand before Him in all 
confidence, our righteousness stinks in His nostrils. 

Had Bunyan never possessed this deep conviction of sin, 
the Pilgrim's Progress would never have been written. Those 
of us who do not groan about sins that we have never com- 
mitted and who do not look upon our human weaknesses as 
odious crimes, feel that the author has not narrated the history 
of our souls. Moreover we do not wish to be like him; we 
desire neither his mind nor his temperament. We do not 
wish to make much ado because the noble in us triumphs over 
the ignoble; we should not imagine we are so saturated with 
vice that to be righteous is a great task. A crimnal trying 
to reform or one suffering from religiomania may appreciate 
the allegory better than the average respectable cultured 
citizen. 

No consolation is ever given. When Evangelist addresses 
Christian and Faithful before they enter Vanity Fair he tells 
them that one of them will die there an unnatural death, but 
that the deceased will be the happier one even though his pain 
is great " not only because he will be arrived at the Celestial 



Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress 79 

City soonest, but because he will escape many miseries that 
the other will meet with in the rest of his journey." That is 
all the comfort that Faithful has when he is shortly afterwards 
scourged, lanced, pricked, stoned and burned to death. 

We differ altogether from Bunyan as to what constitutes 
sin. He wants us to act like Christian, to sever domestic ties, 
shun art, amusement, philosophic speculation, and to become 
pious and ascetic. He does not favor the intellectual or the 
active life. He thinks nothing of a view of life that has not 
theology as its basis. We find very little intellect in the 
book. The most intellectual passage is Mr. Money-Love's 
answer to the problem as to whether a poor minister may not 
alter some of his principles to get a greater benefice and 
whether a merchant may not pretend to be more religious if 
he might thus get more customers. There is something Ma- 
chiavellian in his reasoning and we almost approve it at heart. 
The question under discussion is really whether it sometimes 
is not proper to avoid fanaticism in one's views if such a 
course will redound to the material benefit of a man. And 
those who know the instability- of ideas may not be too hard 
upon such folk who after all make up a large part of the 
world. People have become broad minded and do not inquire 
to closely into every one's religious views in detail. 

Some of the more liberal critics like Froude who admire 
Bunyan try to show us that the allegory can be appreciated 
by the free thinker as well as by the religious. But the matter 
and the form in the allegory are so closely blended that we can 
scarcely disentangle them. Bunyan tried to transmit certain 
ideas and convictions and for this purpose uses his metaphors, 
visions and character sketches. We can select parts of the 



80 Dante and Othee Waning Classics 

book where there is little obtrusion of theology but on the 
whole there is little of secular and artistic value. 

We do not find our experiences or lives related in the story. 
We are no longer like Christian. We find types of ourselves 
in portrayals of those who aim at a goal without being subject 
to religious ravings. We find ourselves in character studies 
of men who have a worthy ambition, who seek love, or crave 
for advancement, or reach out for justice or bear responsi- 
bilities. Occasionally a deluded revivalist comes along who 
creates anew people in the image of Christian. 

There is a second part to the allegory published in 1684, 
six years after the first part. All are agreed that it is the 
inferior of the two parts of the book. It recounts the journey 
of Christiana, the wife of Christian, and their four children 
over the same territory that he traversed to reach the Celestial 
City. She blames herself, unjustly however, for not having 
gone with her husband, although he was the deserter. She 
takes the journey because she had a letter from her husband's 
King. In the second part we meet some new characters, like 
Great-Heart, who no doubt was drawn from one of Cromwell's 
soldiers. He is always fighting giants whom of course he 
vanquishes. There is a repetition of many incidents of the 
first part. There is much theology here and we have the 
children answering their catechism, although some pages later 
on we learn that they get married. The places visited by the 
new pilgrims are not as troublesome as they were to Christian. 
The interesting passages in the second part are few, and one 
of the best is the description of Madame Bubble who repre- 
sents the world. She knows how to win friends, to get along 
comfortably, to turn aside misguided idealists from their 
quests. She makes people sell themselves and strive against 



Bunyan: Pilgeim's Peogeess 81 

one another. There are lacking in the second part the few 
merits we have in the first part. When we think of Bunyan's 
allegory we always think of Christian's progress and not of 
Christiana's. 

In judging the book we must not be blinded by sympathy 
for the author. We know that the allegory was written in 
prison, in which the author languished for twelve years and 
from which he refused to be released on condition that he 
refrain from preaching. Nothing is more admirable than his 
courage and endurance; few men have gone through more 
poignant suffering. But he was deluded; hallucinations 
troubled him; his intelligence was very slight; he clung to the 
theological dogmas he imbibed; he never uttered an original 
idea; he invariably embraced a false view-point. 

We are justified in saying then that the theme of Bunyan's 
work does not vitally touch us to-day. Although like him we 
are also pilgrims on a journey, we are bound for other goals 
and travel with different companions and traverse different 
places. We strive for freedom, for justice, for material help 
to ourselves and fellow men. We pursue culture, art, science, 
philosophy; we are engaged in a business, a profession or a 
trade. We do not wear on our sleeves a badge notifying 
everyone that we seek either a religious or a righteous life. 

In Christian's world we find ourselves strangers. We must 
go back a few centuries and act and feel like the old Puritans, 
but we perceive that we become unnatural. In his world we 
are remote from our own times and. from the times of the most 
cultured ages when the spirit of beauty and speculation was 
abroad. Here beauty is sin and we are forbidden to enjoy it. 
Alas ! a pilgrimage is gone through with much suffering and 



82 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

toil and for what? To live a life in which all that makes 
it sweet is banned and all that is delusive is its goal. The 
end striven for by Christian was death; he sought to know 
how to die rather than how to live. When he reaches the 
Celestial City he has become pure and sinless ; the bitter lesson 
is that death alone will free us from our sins. But we do not 
deliberately seek death through wilful choice of suffering. 
We accept pain and dissolution out of necessity, but do not 
make a religion of them. We know moreover that his effort 
after religious salvation is mere striving after a false ideal 
that he had created for himself; no power within or outside 
of nature demands that we make ourselves miserable to attain 
unworthy goals. 

Moreover allegory as a form of literature has passed away 
and we do not care about bloodless types who are denominated 
by the various vices and virtues. People in real life are 
both good and evil, and literature to be true to life must 
give us such types. In real life good does not always triumph, 
whereas in allegory it must always do so. Then when alle- 
gorizing extends to finding religious meanings in ordinary 
natural events, the reader rebels. For instance when the 
children of Christiana are being catechised, among the 
answers are such as these: the springs come from the sea 
to us through the earth to show us that the grace of Cod 
comes to us through the body of Christ; some springs rise 
out of the tops of high hills to show that the spirit of grace 
will also spring up in the mighty as well as the lowly. 

Bunyan's work does not for one instant deserve the fame it 
has and Christian is not to be compared as a literary personage 
with Gulliver or Eobinson Crusoe and certainly not with Don 
Quixote. 



Buntan: Pilgrim's Progress 83 

When one reflects that the allegory has been translated into 
about seventy-five languages and dialects, one is amazed that 
a work with so little of the eternal values should be so famous. 
The best argument against the intellectual poverty, the artistic 
barrenness and the moral and religious perniciousness of the 
book is that it has been successfully used by missionaries in con- 
verting cannibals, savages and heathens. It is distinctly a 
missionary's hand-book, and not a work of art. It reeks with 
error and falsehood, couched in alluring images, that there is 
little wonder it appeals to aborigines who are deficient in intel- 
ligence and morals. Nor should its wide appeal make one 
think that it has that touch of nature which makes the world 
akin. The story that children delight in the book and read it 
through is mythical ; many children try to read it but usually 
drop it. If one believes that Pilgrim's 'Progress is an effective 
implement to be employed in spreading old-fashioned Chris- 
tianity, let him use it for that purpose if he is bent that way. 
But let us abandon the notion that the vision written in Bed- 
ford Jail is one of the greatest of the world's literary master- 
pieces. 



r 



A KEMPIS: THE IMITATION" OF CHEIST 

The Imitation of Christ is really an apology for the life of 
a monk and hence falls like an incomprehensible message upon 
our ears. It allows us to make no compromise even between 
the spiritual and temporal life; it impresses us as the work 
of a recluse who thought only of illusory things. One might 
take the words " Abandon all reality, ye who enter here " as 
the motto for this book. The author feels that we should 
exterminate our natural instinct; he enjoins upon us religious 
emotion to the exclusion of every other feeling; he seeks to 
base life upon a foundation of false ideas and useless morals 
and to convert the world into one large monastery. 

Why should we imitate Jesus Christ ? Why should millions 
of people pattern themselves after an ascetic and self -martyr- 
ing idealist who lived in a different age and under different 
circumstances from our own. If the world were populated 
with Christ types we would have few great inventors, philoso- 
phers or scientists. Great industrial and diplomatic activities 
would be at a standstill. Why assume that there is no life 
without Jesus, when millions of pagans, Jews, Mohammedans, 
Buddhists, Confucians, and free-thinkers have led happy and 
rational existences without giving thought to him? The 
blind worship and grovelling humility of A Kempis before 
Christ alienates the reader. Take the following passage: 
" What can the world profit thee without Jesus ? To be with- 
out Jesus is a grievous hell; and to be with Jesus, a sweet 
paradise. If Jesus be with thee no enemy shall be able to 



86 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

hurt thee. He that findeth Jesus findeth a good treasure, yea, 
a good above all good. And he that loseth Jesus loseth over- 
much, yea more than the whole world. Most poor is he who 
liveth without Jesus ; and he most rich who is dear to Jesus." 
(Book II, Chap. VIII, Verse 2.) A passage like this appeals 
to one whose credulity has been imposed upon. 

Again take the last chapter of the second book entitled " Of 
the Eoyal Way of the Holy Cross." The author obliges us to 
thrust ourselves into the pathway of pain. But we feel con- 
vinced that life is not attained by courting agony. The world 
should forget the cross, the symbol of martyrdom. But when 
we hear a man shouting " In the cross is salvation, in the cross 
is life, in the cross is protection against our enemies, in the 
cross is infusion of heavenly sweetness, in the cross is strength 
of mind, in the cross joy of spirit, in the cross height of virtue, 
in the cross the perfection of sanctity," we marvel that the 
human spirit should apotheosize all that is antagonistic to it. 
We are told that all consists in the cross and that all lies in 
our dying on it and that there is no other way into life. Yet 
thinkers have given us profound thoughts, poets have sung 
sublime songs, painters have given us soul stirring art-works, 
without the aid of the cross. Scientists have wrested secrets 
from nature chiefly by deliberately throwing down the cross ; 
men have led peaceful beautiful lives without being concerned 
about the cross. A Kempis's extolling of surf ering and death 
irritates us. " Know for certain that thou oughtest to lead 
a dying life. And the more any man dieth to himself, so 
much the more doth he begin to live unto God." " Indeed if 
there had been any better thing, and more profitable to man's 
salvation than suffering, surely Christ would have showed it 
by word and example." But we do not want to lead a dying 



A Kempis: The Imitation of Christ 87 

life ; we do not want salvation through pain ; we do not wish to 
be coddled into welcoming suffering, into lauding all that is 
destructive of life. 

The keynote to the book is in its detestation of nature. Not 
a word is said about a beautiful landscape, about feminine 
beauty; everything that is natural is condemned. It is abso- 
lutely an unnatural book. Grace is the be-all and end-all of 
existence. To pray to God, to abandon the world, to remove 
oneself from one's friends and acquaintances, to hate every- 
thing pleasurable, is what grace commands us. We are told 
man is created anew in the image of God when he completely 
subdues nature and is suffused with grace. A Kempis draws 
an interesting comparison between the different stirrings of 
nature and grace (Book III, Chap. IV). After reading it 
the reader feels that if A Kempis is right nature is a super- 
fluity in the universe. It seems grace is not concerned with 
anything going on here; grace does not mind sorrow, con- 
tempt, ignorance ; she is satisfied with things eternal and con- 
solation in God alone. The reader wonders wherein are the 
crimes of nature because she is unwilling to die or to be kept 
down or subdued, because she strives for her own advantage, 
is willing to have some outward consolation, is disturbed about 
losses, likes leisure and prefers many other things which 
theology has censured but which are really laudable. Let 
grace have her treasure in heaven, let her lack curiosity for 
knowledge, let her delight in rough things ; we will not quarrel 
with those whom she illuminates. But most men are so con- 
structed as to shun her and to follow the promptings of nature. 
To act naturally and prudently is the heritage of all men ; they 
will not heed admonitions to be otherwise than what they 
really are. A book like the Imitation of Christ encourages 



88 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

hypocrisy; we should not venerate a body of precepts that we 
know cannot be practised by a normal man. Life is to be 
enjoyed only by giving nature her due; and there are times 
we should reconcile our philosophy with our lives instead of 
conforming our conduct to the mandates of theology. The 
Christian of to-day does not lead an ascetic life nor does he 
advocate it; and the book does not represent modern Chris- 
tianity. 

A Kempis's zeal for praising God is so great that he deplores 
the necessity of spending some time eating, drinking and 
sleeping. " Would God there were not these necessities " he 
exclaims (Book. I, Chap. XXV, Verse 8). What is this con- 
templation of God, this being united to Him, this praying to 
Him? What is this word of God that man should always 
hearken to it? When A Kempis endeavors to attain the 
kingdom of heaven, he does nothing but seek to follow out 
some fallacious ethical precepts and to be obedient to some 
religious ceremonies all founded by man. This God-worship, 
this struggle towards God, is, as Feuerbach once pointed out, 
but self -worship and the attempt to realize human ideals. To 
be united with God really means to get into a state of ecstasy 
wherein you imagine that you have nothing human about you, 
wherein you think that you are almost the Lord yourself. 
But we can never get rid of the Adam within us, our bodies 
must cling to us even when we are in such ecstasy; the mark 
of the animal is always upon us. To obey the word of God 
means to do things that some people formerly said were holy ; 
in other words the supposed word of God is nothing more than 
the word of man. The realization of the divine is but the 
achievement of something human. All the errors of antiquity 
are forced upon us by the statement that they emanate from 



A Kempis: The Imitation of Christ 89 

God. One finds every savage and every semi-civilized age 
attributes its unsupportable fabrications and crude concep- 
tions to its deity. Mysticism resolves itself into something 
earthiest of the earthy. There is no word of God, no possi- 
bility of being suffused with God, no communion with or 
experience of God. Man worships his own ideals, and attrib- 
utes them to a Creator. The kingdom of heaven is nothing 
more than a monk's paradise. 

Yet there are instances where A Kempis moves us by the 
glowing warmth of his prayer, bespeaking the thousand agonies 
of his soul. It is apparent that he suffered from his seclu- 
sion, from his attempt to lead an unnatural life. As an 
instance let any one read the chapter called " Of the day of 
eternity and this life's straitness " (Book III, Chap. XLVIII) . 
Its fervor is unsurpassed. It is a heart-breaking complaint 
of a frail mortal pleading for relief from sorrow. It shows 
a noble aspiration for an ideal, mistaken as that is; it pleads 
for security from wicked thoughts. It depicts the struggles he 
was constantly undergoing with himself and he here strikes 
a chord in our own hearts. 

Nevertheless A Kempis makes little appeal to us. His con- 
tempt for knowledge, for the world, for humanity, render him 
an unsympathetic creature. We study him as a type of ascet- 
icism through his prayers and addresses. He is almost a differ- 
ent creature from ourselves ; he is not possessed of our aspira- 
tions and ambitions; he does not seem to have our emotions, 
frailties, affections. He makes no mention of the love of the 
sexes; he rails against friendship; he is not interested in the 
domestic relations. Everything that makes life worth living 
is subject to his condemnation. Were we to follow his pre- 
cepts we should experience no delights whatsoever. Were we 



90 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

to take his counsel we would stagnate intellectually and injure 
ourselves both materially and morally. 

Yet liberal minded thinkers have bowed in reverence to this 
harmful author out of deference to authority. A free-thinker 
like George Eliot almost becomes fervid speaking about the 
Imitation of Christ in her Mill on the Floss. A positivist 
like Comte treasured the book highly and constantly had it 
by his side. How powerfully the opinions of ancient critics 
sway us ! Here are two authors who separated themselves 
from belief in ascetic and dogmatic Christianity and they 
idolize a work that reeks with medievalism. They should have 
been among the first to emancipate themselves from worship 
of a book whose persistence gives superstition a strong weapon. 

More controversies have arisen to solve the question of the 
authorship of the Imitation of Christ than of almost any 
other book. For three hundred years books and pamphlets 
have been written to establish the claims that have been made 
for Gersen, A Kempis and others. A whole library could be 
formed of publications which are concerned with this subject. 
What futile learning and patient research is often wasted on 
trite themes ! It is profitless to expend scholarship on the 
question of the authorship of any book, even though a worthy 
one; how much more vanity is it to seek to determine who 
wrote a harmful and inartistic book ! 

The Imitation of Christ has been translated into over fifty 
languages and has gone through more than six thousand edi- 
tions. It is almost incomprehensible. But hymn books and 
prayer books are being constantly reprinted. And as a matter 
of fact A Kempis's book is not literature at all but a religious 
handbook that has been palmed off upon us as a literary mas- 
terpiece. It is a book of devotion and not an aesthetic per- 



A Kempis: The Imitation of Christ 91 

formance. Though the product of a Catholic, Protestants 
have also found much in it to satisfy them ; in their editions 
they usually omit the fourth book on the Communion. This 
little volume written in Holland in the early part of the 
fifteenth century by the manuscript copyist A Kempis has 
probably done more to keep alive medieval dogma than any 
other book published since. 

We listen to him and cannot help thinking of our Darwin. 
We read and yet cannot rid ourselves of remembrances of our 
studies in comparative religion. We feel the promptings of 
our physical faculties and wonder why the author wants us 
to resist them. He appears to us like a visitor from some 
other planet. 

To-day we ask men to lead good and useful lives ; we do not 
think it wrong to better one's condition; we only ask that 
people should not wilfully and needlessly pain their neighbor. 
We admit that A Kempis also struggles for a high moral ideal, 
but it is a useless and often pernicious one. He lays more 
stress on religious ecstasy and prayer and church rites than 
on a purely moral life. When he does laud humility he never 
dreams that it is of earthly growth just as pride is and that 
there is nothing divine about it. He is obsessed by the notion 
that he is closer to God when on his knees in his chamber than 
when out in the open field observing the beauty of nature. 
We say to ourselves, " This man is mad for he is living con- 
stantly in delusions. He mistakes the figments of his brain 
for realities. The book is a madman's Bible." 

No doubt the Imitation of Christ still brings consolation 

to many, it still takes off a weary load from the minds of many 

of its readers. But it can help only those who subscribe to 

effete dogma; the reader must be intellectually fettered to 

7 



92 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

reap the full benefits of perusing this work. The scholar 
may find something in the book that appeals to him. For he, 
like the monk, also lives a secluded life, devoted to his ideal 
and scorning the world. But he does not necessarily pursue 
phantoms nor does he give up the world because it is a sinful 
one. He studies in solitude because he is really an epicurean ; 
he gives up minor pleasures for a great one. 

The book insists upon our renouncing our will, upon our 
suppressing our individuality, upon our stifling our abilities. 
We surfer many of our misfortunes because we cannot will, 
because we cannot bravely assert our personalities. We should, 
therefore, not lavish praises upon a book that encourages us 
in our weakness in developing our will power. It may no 
doubt be prudent to crush our will for that which is beyond 
our power, but to ask us to root out our desires for things that 
we can attain by a slight exertion, is unfair. We are creatures 
of flesh and blood and in us have been planted certain instincts, 
like that of love for knowledge, art, honor, riches and beauty, 
and it is useless to tell us that we should have contempt for 
all the things of this world in order to tend towards the king- 
dom of heaven. 

The book preaches everything that is opposed to the best in 
Greek and modern authors. It tells us that the more we can 
get out of ourselves, the more divine will we be; they tell us 
that the more we can be ourselves the more will we approach 
the divine. The Imitation maintains that the less we rely on 
ourselves and the more we adopt the ideas of others, the nobler 
will we be. Greek and modern literature recognize that we can 
only cultivate the best that is in us by trusting solely in our- 
selves. A Kempis repeatedly asserts human nature to be vile, 
man to be full of sin, not worth comfort or consolation. 



A Kempis: The Imitation of Cheist 93 

Greater authors and deeper thinkers and higher moralists 
teach us that human nature is not vile, that man is to be 
treated as dignified. 

" The scheme of the book," said Thackeray, " if carried 
out would make the world a wretched dreary place of sojourn. 
There would be no manhood, no love, no tender ties of mother 
and child, no use of intellect, no trade or science, a set of 
selfish beings crawling about avoiding one another, and howl- 
ing a perpetual miserere." 

The author goes so far as to say that even after we have given 
everything of ourselves, completely renounced all the pleasures 
of this world and entirely suppressed our own individualities, 
even then we have done nothing. It is at a point like this one 
loses patience with the philosophy of life laid down and criti- 
cal examination must stop. 



ST. AUGUSTINE: CONFESSION'S 

The Confessions of St. Augustine has been his most perma- 
nent literary performance. It appeals to many not because 
of the abundant theology coursing through it but as a psy- 
chological document showing the workings of the mind and 
spirit of a man who is undergoing the process of conversion. 
It has come down to us as a monument to a sinner who, trying 
all creeds, embraced Christianity and became the most able 
and influential of the Fathers of the Church. It finds among 
its admirers critics who accept nothing of Augustinism, but 
are attracted by the story of its author's misdeeds, by the 
account of his intellectual wanderings and final conversion, 
by his tale of motherly devotion and by some of his reflections 
on secular subjects. 

Yet the reader who is aware of what baneful influence St. 
Augustine has been in spreading many false and pernicious 
views, would prefer that he had never been converted. He 
did much to ruin the intellectual standpoint of humanity and 
to plunge Europe into the dark ages. He indulged in more 
fruitless controversies and speculated on more useless prob- 
lems and gave more absurd solutions to questions than most 
of his contemporaries. He added so much dogma to the 
simple moral precepts of Christianity and he was the prede- 
cessor of the scholastic philosophers. 

His Confessions is distinctly old-fashioned Christian litera- 
ture and must necessarily appeal most to faithful medieval 
Christians. To the adherent of any other religion or the 



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96 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

person emancipated from all revealed religion it presents few 
attractions. A certain measure of sympathy with its views 
is necessary to awaken appreciation for the book. It has had 
an unhealthy influence in driving men into religious mania, 
and it has founded a whole school of literature, namely the 
books containing accounts of sinners and criminals who were 
reformed by accepting dogmas. One hears the voice of St. 
Augustine in the speeches of Salvation Army speakers. One 
hears it in frenzied and fanatical revivalists who go about 
driving whole communities mad. One finds an analogy 
between him and a man like Tolstoi, who ruined his art 
because he turned his mind to religion for solace for his early 
sins. 

One thing that makes the Confessions tedious is that the 
book is addressed directly to God, and not to the reader. The 
author talks with the Creator as if He were a priest to whom 
he is is confessing his sins. He cringes before Him and coaxes 
Him. He assumes that God is interested in every step that 
he takes; so he flatters Him and lavishes compliments upon 
Him. He feels that God is a pious Christian who is greatly 
concerned because men want to follow out their natural in- 
stincts and enjoy life. He loves the Creator as though He were 
flesh and blood and expects Him to cease from His work in 
speeding on the universe to absorb Himself in St. Augustine. 
His Deity is always disapproving of something or other. We 
become offended with the fawning apologies of the author. 
We want God removed from the book and not to interfere 
with the story that the sinner has to tell. And those who do 
not accept the theory of a personal God who is sitting up in the 
heavens and growing angry because religious and moral sinners 
exist, feel that St. Augustine is talking in vain, that no one 



St. Augustine: Confessions 97 

hears him, that no power cares the least whether he had been 
converted or not, that no supernatural agency is weighing 
every deed of his. The bringing in of God has spoiled the 
Confessions as a piece of literature. 

God takes no more concern about us than he does about the 
lower creatures from whom we are descended. Everything 
demonstrates that there is no special power outside of nature 
herself, taking a particular interest in mankind. We believe 
that men are not being specially watched by such a power, that 
we live out our lives in accordance with eternal and immutable 
laws which have made us what we are, that we have evolved 
through pre-existing conditions by necessity and that no mind 
has purposely designed our physical or moral nature. The 
God who has the human qualities most lauded by man like love, 
intelligence, power, righteousness, does not exist. He was 
invented by man as an embodiment of ideals which man would 
like to see prevail. The God who created this universe out of 
nothing, who may be induced by prayer to violate the laws of 
nature, to interfere in our affairs and forward our happiness, 
who is angry when men sin and wants virtue to triumph and 
who asks us to accept Christ as His son is a chimera. 

There is no doubt that the two most admired books of the 
Confessions are the eighth and the ninth, the former contain- 
ing the account of St. Augustine's conversion and the latter 
the story of his mother Monica and of her death. 

He was converted by hearing of how others less learned than 
himself embraced Christianity through their reading of St. 
Anthony, the Egyptian monk. He began to see how crooked, 
defiled, spotted and ulcerous he was and he marvelled that 
the unlearned thus took heaven by force while he with his learn- 
ing wallowed in flesh and blood. Then he did much weeping; 



98 Dante and Other Waking Classics 

he imagined that God was angry at him for his sins ; remorse 
stirred him ; he heard a voice telling him to take up and read 
and then he read the passage telling him to put on the Lord 
Jesus Christ and not to make provision for the flesh. But the 
seeds of his conversion had been sown in him as a child when 
his mother instilled the lessons of Christ in him. His nature 
was essentially a religious nature; he found difficulty recon- 
ciling this with his wanton life. He had mistresses, one of 
whom bore him a child. It was partly a guilty conscience 
that influenced him in his conversion. He needed theology 
to purify him morally; otherwise he would have remained 
riotous. 

We sympathise with his sincerity and his desire to find 
truth and to reform, but we know that he is deluded. He 
would not live a temperate life unless he felt that God was 
pleased with him and would reward him in the future. He 
did not love goodness for itself, but because it was pleasing 
to Christ. He needed as an example the story of a monk 
like St. Anthony to persuade him that life should not consist 
only of physical pleasure. He had to know that God sent His 
son down to die for him, before he would lead a moral life. 
St. Augustine is the type of the well meaning but misguided 
sinner who regrets his misdeeds and needs religion alone to 
reform him. 

The world has had^ too many of these stories of conversions 
to dogmatic religion. It needs more accounts of people who 
have been emancipated from it, of men who have thrown over 
the shackles of superstition which bound them. Let us have 
the tales of those who braved their times and defied their 
friends and stood out clear of all the theological trappings 
that bound them. Let us listen to the cries of relief of 



St. Augustine: Confessions 99 

people who, having lived in religions error, became " heretical " 
and refused to continue walking in darkness. We would 
rather pernse the story of the sinner, if sinner we must have, 
who tells us that he was reformed by the desire no longer to 
afflict others with pain, by a growing love of righteousness for 
its own sake. We are not aware that morality must be taught 
by means of theology to everybody. 

As a result of his conversion St. Augustine gave up teach- 
ing oratory and devoted himself to God. We see his intel- 
lectual dissolution immediately. He becomes a believer in 
two very common errors in the Middle Ages, one in the power 
of prayer to cure disease and the other in the efficacy of a touch 
of the corpse of a saint to cure blindness. He tells us in all 
seriousness how when stricken with the toothache he asked his 
friends to pray for him and how as soon as they bowed their 
knees, the pain disappeared. He also relates that, when a 
blind man touched with his handkerchief the bier of two 
recently exhumed martyrs, his eyes were opened immediately. 
If St. Augustine previously believed these events could not 
have occurred, is it not to be regretted that his mental powers 
should have been so weakened by his conversion as to make 
him place credence in these miracles ? 

St. Augustine shows more of the human touch in his great 
love for his mother. His grief moves us, but the type of 
woman for which Monica stands is not admirable. She is a 
patient Griselda type and represents the woman who admitted 
that she was her husband's slave and did not complain about 
his wrongs to her. She allowed her husband to wrong her 
bed, and she never resisted him when angry, even by word. 
She told other women that they were really servants after they 
were married and that they should not set themselves up 



100 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

against their lords. She was fanatical on the subject of reli- 
gion. She was willing to die now that her supreme desire, the 
conversion of her son to Christianity, had been accomplished. 
As an instance of her wisdom her son tells of a reply she gave 
to some who wanted to know if she were not afraid when away 
from her own city. " Nothing is far to God," she said, " nor 
was it to fear lest at the end of the world He should not 
recognize whence He were to raise me up." 

Before dying she used to discuss the eternal life with her 
son. Nothing of this earth that was most delightful to the 
earthly senses could be compared to the sweetness of that life. 
One ponders on this spectacle of mother and son mutually 
encouraging one another in illusions and yet one cannot help 
but loving them. When Monica finally dies, her son for a 
while forgets his religion; the natural man breaks out and we 
have a masterly recital of a son's grief for the death of his 
mother. There is no one who will not sympathise with him 
here. There is something naive about his trust in God when 
he prayed to Him to heal his sorrows ; and as God did not do 
so, the bereaved man concluded that even though he now fed 
upon no deceiving word, still the Lord wanted to impress upon 
him how strong is the bond of all habit. 

The asceticism of St. Augustine is the natural reaction 
which theology has brought upon a man who once loved life 
and study. He now looks upon all learning that has not God 
as its subject as fruitless. He asks what profit did the reading 
of so-called liberal books procure him. He knew rhetoric, 
music and mathematics, but he did not thence sacrifice to 
God. In fact they helped him on the road to perdition since he 
did not keep his strength for God. He mentions his studies 
in Cicero and Aristotle, but they were defective to him because 



St. Augustine: Confessions 101 

they did not mention Christ nor help him to define God. He 
regrets having striven after theatrical applause and poetical 
prizes; he is even sorry that he witnessed shows. He now 
formed theories of life entirely in conflict with his pleasure- 
loving nature. He who formerly loved fame concluded that 
to want to be loved by one's fellow creatures for the joy therein 
was evidence of a miserable life and foul boastfulness. 

He decides that he must not allow his senses to make him 
happy as enjoyment was sinful. He does not want his eyes 
to love fair and varied forms and bright and soft colors; he 
wants God to occupy his soul instead, for He made these things. 
He seeks not to have any pleasures from eating, smelling, hear- 
ing. He regrets that men make certain adornments in their 
clothes, that they make pictures to tempt their eyes. People 
follow these artistic products which they themselves make and 
neglect God who made them. He objects to the trait of curi- 
osity which leads men to search out the hidden power of 
nature. A large portion of the tenth book is taken up with 
a statement of his ascetic ideals and one is saddened to know 
that the effect of conversion has been to make a student of 
philosophy, an author of an aesthetic treatise, hate both knowl- 
edge and beauty. He attacks pleasures which no one thinks 
reprehensible. We do not have to defend the right of the 
eye, ear and nostrils to enjoy their natural functions. Yet 
the man who admits that he once practised some unnatural 
vices sets himself up as a censor of all natural forms of enjoy- 
ment. 

He is too stern and when he blames himself for simple boyish 
faults we are amused. Of course he cried when his elders did 
not accede to his wishes; he neglected his studies and played 
games; he liked to hear stories and see shows; he committed 



J 



102 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

petty thefts at home and told lies. Though he complains of 
being beaten and blames elder people for similar vices on a 
larger scale he makes too much of his wickedness. He even 
deplores the fact that he wept at the story of Dido's love for 
^Eneas and did not think of weeping at his own want of love 
for God. 

However the Confessions is not altogether the tale of a 
sinner. St. Augustine draws a curtain over much that would 
interest us; he may be sincere but he is neither frank nor 
honest. One looks in vain for a really true picture of an un- 
blushing sinner. He tells us that he stole pears as a boy and 
moralizes beautifully over the deed. He did not want the pears 
and even threw them away ; he loved the company and the sport. 
But the theft took place in his sixteenth year. He had a 
concubine by whom he had a son and then when she was torn 
away he took another, but a few short paragraphs tell of his 
illicit relations. He does not say anything about these women 
nor of his relations with them. Women meant so much to 
him as a young man and yet he passes them by. He never 
entertains us with vivid realistic accounts of his sins. He 
has not the courage or openness of a Eousseau. He does not 
dwell for any length on any event that tends to incriminate 
him. He just mentions his sin, but what the reader misses is 
the graphic account of his wrong-doings. 

The Confessions is really a history of his intellectual develop- 
ment. He was in turn a Manichean, a sceptic, a Neo-Platonist 
and a Christian. We pity him as he shows himself in the 
throes of doubt, always taking up something new and then 
rinding a reason for discarding it. That he ended by accepting 
dogma is only proof that he needed authority to compel him 
to hold steadfast by his doctrines. The man of ever nuctuat- 



St. Augustine: Confessions 103 

ing opinions either becomes a Nihilist, believing nothing, or 
he attaches himself to a creed and accepts everything that it 
sanctions. We are not interested in the trite reasons he gives 
for dropping and accepting various beliefs; but we love to 
observe his ever wavering mind. 

He read some Neo-Platonists and found that they identified 
the Word or Logos with God. But Neo-Platonism was for 
St. Augustine really a step towards Christianity because of its 
emphasis on idealism. Neo-Platonism taught the existence 
of the spiritual without the accompaniment of the material. 
However this system of philosophy to-day is rejected by many 
thinkers and moreover is not used as a means of defending 
Christianity. There is no doubt that St. Augustine would 
have become converted had he never heard of Neo-Piatonism. 
What attracted him about Christianity was the idea of the 
atonement ; the clause " the Word was made flesh " meant for 
him that God descended upon the earth in the body of Christ. 

The doctrines that had the strongest hold on St. Augustine 
were those of Manicheism. He attacks these continually 
just because they had held him in thrall. The reasons he 
advances for abandoning the views of the Manicheans may not 
be convincing; he found some astronomical errors in their 
books and was disillusioned with one of their teachers, Faustus. 
Manicheism with its theories of light and darkness and good 
and evil fighting each other is a dead issue. There are many 
pages in his book on the subject of Manicheism and they do 
not form entertaining reading. 

As a story of intellectual development the Confessions is 
trivial; we find retrogression rather than progress. We like 
the St. Augustine who read his Cicero and Aristotle, who 
enjoyed shows and loved life. We regret that he never carried 



104 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

out his plan of becoming a disciple of Epicurus instead of 
drifting off into theology. He might have embraced a phi- 
losophy which taught that the gods do not interfere in the 
doings of man and lay up no tormenting Hades for him; 
instead St. Augustine adopted a belief which taught that God 
sets the laws of nature at rest for his favorite, man, and yet 
prepares a monstrous hell where people suffer for eternity. 
He held wisdom in the hollow of his hand and lo, it evaporated ! 
He records the sad tale of his intellectual decline and believes 
he has received an acquisition of divine wisdom. He plunges 
into darkness and superstition and imagines he has found the 
way to eternal bliss. He never realizes that he has become a 
fallen creature, that he is now inferior to those thinkers whom 
he once venerated and whom he now holds in contempt. 

There is something cowardly about the man that is apparent 
throughout the Confessions. We see this cowardice in the 
account he gives us of his desertion of his mother after he had 
persuaded her to wait for him all night. We see it in his 
refusal to state the nature of the crime he committed in church 
and for which he deserved death, according to his own judg- 
ment. He refrained from carnal pleasure only because he 
feared the Lord's punishment. He abandoned the sinful life 
because he felt assured that he would thus get into the grace 
of God and attain the blessed abodes of heaven. 

The Confessions is of interest chiefly to the student of relig- 
ious phenomena. Those who like to study the repentant tem- 
perament from the psychological point of view will be inter- 
ested in this work. Those who, instead of trying to root out 
error, prefer to study it and apologise for it will find ample 
opportunity for doing so in this autobiography. But the 
critic who does not wish to encourage countless repetitions of 



St. Augustine: Confessions 105 

a similar evolution to puerile doctrines will not look sympa- 
thetically upon the story of St. Augustine's conversion. We 
should condemn the triumph of undoubted falsehood and not 
be forever trying to explain it away. We may exclaim that 
all such phenomena as religious conversion are to be accounted 
for by enviroment, disposition and other causes, but we must 
also consider the question whether such conversion is worthy 
of our approval; whether it does not make a man deteriorate. 
The Confessions, while it relates events unconnnected with 
dogma such as the author's friendship with Alypius, is on the 
whole ruined by theology. The last four of the thirteen books 
particularly are unreadable and are omitted in some editions. 
We are called upon to applaud the spectacle of a noble mind 
overthrown by dogma; we are asked by the author to place 
full faith in his theological tenets ; he recounts his adventures 
only for the purpose of converting us also. But we are unable 
to feel with him. We know that his conversion was one of the 
greatest calamities in the history of the world. He kept civili- 
zation back for many centuries; his evil influence still goes 
on. Besides the autobiographies of Goethe or Eousseau or 
Cellini his story is insignificant. 



PASCAL: THOUGHTS 

Pascal's book Thoughts was posthumously published in 1670 
about eight years after its author's death. These reflections 
were jotted down irregularly and we have them chiefly in 
fragmentary form. They were intended to be an apology for 
the Christian religion. There are sceptical ideas here and 
there which show the influence of Montaigne. But it is no 
longer customary to regard Pascal as a freethinker. He is 
now regarded by many critics as one of the great bulwarks of 
Christianity. We know that he believed in the dogmas that 
are part of the Christian religion. He was ascetic in his out- 
look upon life and disapproved of pleasure and diversion. 

It is true Pascal admits at times that we cannot actually 
prove the truth of the Christian religion or the existence of a 
God. His chief proof, which is really a negation of proof, is 
that in matters like these the heart is a better guide than the 
head. He is willing to trust to his instincts; he is confident 
that he cannot err here. He assumes that he would not have 
been made to feel instinctively that the Christian religion was 
true had it not been so. He claims that the heart gives us 
knowledge of first principles, that we know for instance there 
are three dimensions in space and that numbers are infinite, 
not through our reason, but by instinctive knowledge. This 
of course is not so. We may feel something instinctively 
to-day but back in the distant ages it was a process of reasoning 
which made our ancestors accept particular conclusions. There 
was a reason once assigned for every belief ; we continue cling- 
ing to the theory long after we have discovered the fallacy of 
8 



108 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

the arguments that originally supported it. A former method 
of thinking influences us in our " instinctive " feeling to-day. 

To call upon the heart as justification for a belief is the last 
resort of one who admits that his faith appears hopeless from 
the point of view of reason. The savage who believes in idols 
may argue in the same manner as Pascal does. Belief in 
witchcraft, ghosts, devils was originally supported. by proof 
and finally became part of the instinctive knowledge of some 
people. We feel assured of the " truth " of certain matters 
that are really false, only because our emotions have been 
trained and prejudiced to feel that way for ages. A Moham- 
medan or Jew does not feel in his heart that God had a son 
who had to die to save mankind. Just as one's conscience 
may annoy him if he has transgressed some trivial religious 
rites because it had been formed that way by many ages of 
religious education, so one may feel that the false religion 
he was born in is veracity itself. 

It is true, the emotions are often the only guide for us. A 
man who is hungry does not reason that he ought to eat any 
more than does one who comes in contact with something that 
causes him pain, argue that he ought to withdraw his body 
from the obnoxious object. Here instinct is a true guide. 
But how different from that of which Pascal speaks, which is 
to reveal to us truth in intellectual matters ! It does not follow 
that everything my heart would like to believe is true. I 
naturally want to converse with the dead ones I love, but I 
cannot be sure that I will do so because I am so inclined. I 
may be disappointed with the injustice in this world, but that 
does not prove that there must be another perfect world, because 
I feel there should be one. Let us face the truth that nature 



Pascal : Thoughts 109 

does not concern herself with our desires nor take any sugges- 
tions from us as to how this universe should be conducted. 

So it is untrue to say that the heart and not the reason 
proves to us the truth of Christianity and the existence of a 
personal God; that the heart should be trusted in its adoption 
of faith; that we should try to know things not by the effort 
of the understanding but by the simple submission of the 
reason. No doubt the mind is limited, but that is no excuse 
for believing what is utterly repugnant to it. It is our guide 
in dismissing absurdities even though it does not disclose to us 
all knowledge. 

One of the most famous passages in Pascal shows us that 
we ought to accept God, by means of the analogy of a wager. 
He says that by believing in a God one has everything to gain 
and nothing to lose, that we should prefer risking our single 
brief life for the possibility of gaining eternity. Pascal holds 
that it is better to be on the safe side and to adopt a belief in 
which there is no harm and possibly rewards for accepting it. 
You may suffer an eternity of pains by being a non-believer, 
so do not undertake the risk. But other religious sects tell us 
we are lost if we do not accept their dogmas and the gods and 
the leaders whom they worship. They also may apply the 
analogy of the wager in making us adopt their faiths. But 
why should I be placed in the position of forcing a belief upon 
myself because its upholders start with premises which I 
reject from the start. One may as well make me believe in 
demons and mythical creatures by telling me that it is most 
advisable not to doubt their existence, since if they do exist 
they may torture me after I am dead. To frighten one into a 
religion is the most primitive way of spreading it, but fear 
does not have any effect upon those who immediately sweep 



110 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

away certain conclusions. If the wager theory governed us in 
making us receive articles of faith it could be utilized for any 
creed and indeed for all absurdities that have sprung up in 
the breasts of mankind. Many critics have dismissed the 
wager-idea of Pascal with a shake of the head. 

The keynote of Pascal's religion is the corruption of human 
nature; he dwells on it constantly; he has not the slightest 
doubt that man is fallen from a higher state and is vile. He 
admits that we cannot conceive the transmission of Adam's 
sin to us but he is satisfied that we are miserable and corrupt 
and that we can be saved by Jesus. He admits it is unjust 
that we should suffer for Adam's sin and yet asserts that with- 
out this mystery we are incomprehensible to ourselves, and that 
God has concealed the knot which would untie this mystery, 
to render the difficulty of our existence more unintelligible to 
us. Thus Pascal simply makes statements which have nothing 
to support them and adopts as the corner-stone of his religion 
an exploded dogma. He tries to balance our corruption with 
a certain divinity that he says exists in us. Now man is 
neither divine nor corrupt. He is not a fallen creature nor 
can he ever rise to be a god. He has evolved from lower 
creatures, is a natural product of nature just as all other 
living creatures are, and he calls that sin which either causes 
pain to some one or violates a custom. 

Pascal is fascinated by the two extremes in man's nature, 
his corruption and his capability of being saved. He com- 
ments on both the brutishness and greatness of man. He 
maintains that only through the Christian religion does man 
learn his true state. But the reader wonders whither all this 
dogmatizing leads, what it solves. Man will continue as before 
to satisfy his natural desires, seek diversion and think on 



Pascal : Thoughts 111 

subjects that are of material interest to him. The greatness 
of a religion is not proved by its assumption that man is vilest 
of the vile and yet may become divine. 

If Pascal had only known that we have the marks of the brute 
upon us even more than he imagined and that we possess 
still in our bodies rudimentary organs which we once used in 
a wild stage ! If he could but have known that in spite of our 
animal nature most of us do not consider ourselves corrupt 
and born in sin but decent though imperfect! We try to 
avoid paining a neighbor purposelessly and transgressing 
against our sense of justice. In the future no system of 
thought will interest us that is based on the fundamental 
corruption presumed to be in man. People are probably 
more the victims of stupidity, convention and necessity than 
actually wicked for the mere sake of being wicked. 

Pascal tried to defend miracles that we cannot accept. 
We know he believed that his niece's disease of the eye was 
cured by a touch from the thorn of the crown which it was 
supposed that the savior had worn. He held that the best 
proof of the Biblical miracles was in the very fact that there 
had been made false claims for other miracles which were not 
true. He is wroth at those who deny the virgin birth and 
resurrection as if they were impudent. He thinks when he 
tells us that a hen lays eggs without a cock, he has answered 
the objection of the virgin birth, but he omits to state that 
the hen's eggs will not hatch. He thinks he demolishes the 
disbelief in resurrection by asking whether birth is not more 
miraculous than a return to one's being. Theologians to-day 
do not use Pascal's arguments in support of miracles. 

His views on Jesus Christ are medieval. To him Christ 
is the center to which all tends; he who knows Christ knows 



112 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

the reason of all things. Pascal abhors any one who seeks 
God apart from Jesns. We know God only by Jesns and by 
Him we prove God. We know onr selves by Jesus Christ and 
apart from Christ we know neither life nor death nor God 
nor ourselves. In short Christ is God Himself. Onr prayers 
and virtues are abominations before God if they are not of 
Jesus Christ. Pascal dislikes the deist as well as the atheist. 
Thus Pascal descends into theology and much of his Thoughts 
is not within the sphere of literature. 

How weak are his arguments against the sceptics ! Indeed 
he occasionally and unintentionally gives arguments in favor 
of their views, hence it was concluded by some that he was a 
freethinker. He tries to use arguments that are against his 
faith in support of it. The fact that there are more religions 
than one, is used by him to show that only one religion, the 
Christian, can be true; for if there were only one religion it 
would have been too easily recognized ! The truth of religion 
can be seen, according to Pascal, in its very obscurity, in the 
little light we have of it and in our indifference to accepting 
it. God has willed to hide Himself from some because they 
are unworthy, and He has revealed Himself to others. There 
is no reason for all this except that so He willed. But most 
people are justified in believing that when a religion is given 
to save mankind and a redeemer is sent down, the eyes of men 
should have been opened by that very God who wished to save 
them. Nor should that God conceal His true creed among 
other false ones so that it should be difficult for men to know 
which is the true one. Why should God endeavor to save men 
and yet set up obstacles that might have been easily removed ? 
Alas, Pascal does not understand that all religions have grown 
up in the same way, that they represent the ideals of their 



Pascal : Thoughts 113 

creators, that they are all fitted in part for those who believe 
in them and that they all abound in some falsehoods. He 
does not see that it matters little to Nature what men believe 
and that some religions are ruining men whom they are sup- 
posed to be saving, and he does not understand it is man who 
has made God in his own image. Yet he occasionally bestirs 
himself and exclaims that his proofs are not conclusive. He 
admits that he does not see everywhere the marks of a Creator 
although he is sure of the divinity of Christ. He confesses 
that even the proofs of Christianity are not convincing, but 
not unreasonable; still he undertakes to defend belief in the 
supernatural. He is inferior intellectually to Montaigne and 
Spinoza because they cast dogma and revelation aside. 

His mind delighted in paradoxes and contradictions and we 
see that he has accepted his beliefs beforehand and then sought 
proof for them instead of being led to them by evidence. Not 
many came so near grasping the truth and then let it elude 
them. The very reflections that drove others to discard dogma 
persuaded him to cling to it all the closer. Even the existence 
of evil was used by him to defend religion. He saw mam's 
position in the universe and perceived man's failings as a 
thinking being and he therefore concluded that Christ was 
divine and had to save man. No one was keener and yet 
more illogical than Pascal. 

When he compared man's rank in nature to a nonentity as 
contrasted with infinity, to a universe contrasted with a 
nonentity, we wonder how Pascal could entertain the idea 
that man is the be-all and end-all of this universe, that God 
Himself died for him. Pascal looked out mentally into re- 
motest corners of the universe; he contemplated the most 
invisible atom. Yet he could not perceive man was but a 



114 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

link in the chain of nature and that vanity makes him believe 
that he is an exception to all the natural laws. Pascal held 
some liberal philosophic views but nevertheless adopted reac- 
tionary theological conceptions. 

He intended to be an apologist for Christianity but he 
really did not advance any plausible and convincing argument 
in its favor. He simply concluded that he felt this belief 
must be true. He even refused to accept proofs of religion 
from the works of nature herself. He did a service to man- 
kind in rejecting such testimony but he did not realize what 
a weapon he put in the hands of sceptics when he stated that 
to try to prove the existence of a God from the works of nature 
herself shows religion has but weak proofs. He also main- 
tains that in the attempt to prove God's existence metaphysi- 
cally we see the evil results of trying to learn of God without 
Christ, to communicate with God without a mediator. Every 
argument men have used to prove God's existence he finds 
faulty and he does not present any stronger one himself. 
How illogical it is to say we cannot prove God's existence and 
then to assert we need Christ to know Him without showing 
conclusively first that we can know Him through Christ; 
nature should at least testify to the existence of God in Christ, 
if she does not to that of God. 

What inane conclusions he arrived at when he wondered 
about the riddle of man's existence ! He feels that there is 
an eternity and that man should not be indifferent to it. He 
argues thus : Perhaps torments face you ; this life is very 
likely a preparation for a future life ; it may be a dream from 
which we will awake in death. The immortality of the soul 
is an established fact and people should be thinking about it 
all the time. It is not proper that we should act as we often 



Pascal : Thoughts 115 

do if the soul is immortal. How stupid must be the man who 
does not, reflect what will become of him ! In short when 
Pascal troubles himself with these questions he does it with 
his mind perverted by works on theology. He does it with 
a certain morbidity, he becomes pathological and we cannot 
enter into his way of feeling. 

Men to-day are willing to place confidence in the scheme of 
things and to take for granted that they will not be damned. 
We wish to have our lives here free from pain and believe that 
we should not ascribe a deliberately evil purpose to nature 
when she really has none at all. We feel that in love and 
nature and art we have our delights and we do not want to be 
groaning needlessly about futile fears. Why let Pascal per- 
suade us to inflict misery upon ourselves ? Why let him give 
to us, under the pretext of trying to stir us up into philosophic 
speculation as to our destiny, the cruelest and falsest inventions 
of religious maniacs, a belief in a hell ? We are not, like Pas- 
cal, miserable because we don't know what may become of us 
after death. He is aware that in trying to arouse us to think 
about our future after death he employs the strongest weapon 
that was instrumental in winning men to religion in the past. 
But we do not believe that nature thinks mankind or the 
church important enough for her to lay up a special hell for 
men who have not led a life sanctioned by the church. Pascal 
does not for a moment suspect that what won't happen to 
animals may not happen to man. Nay, he finds that when 
men reason out that they should be indifferent to the question 
of their future life, this in itself redounds to the glory of 
religion and strengthens it. 

Pascal does not appeal to us when he criticises us for seek- 
ing diversions, when he would hinder us from finding joy in 



116 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

life. He claims that pleasure and sport are deceptive for we 
indulge in them to forget ourselves and to avoid thinking of 
our destiny. But the only realities in life are the joys that 
we experience, the love we feel, the good we accomplish, the 
work we perform. Let the unseen world take care of itself. It 
may have suited the unfortunate Pascal to complain that his 
sister derived too much pleasure in loving her child; it may 
have pleased him to torture himself by wearing an iron girdle 
with spikes which he occasionally pressed to hurt him. But 
we know that he made a philosophy out of his love of pain. 
He worshipped sickness thinking it the natural state of a 
Christian. Sickness was to him a blessing for it naturally 
made him shun all worldly passions. We can then understand 
why he hates the theater and all other amusements. Nor 
does he believe in love at all. He wants you to love only God, 
and not your fellow creatures ; he thinks whatever is pleasing 
to man is obnoxious to God. He did not want to enjoy eating ; 
he made a blessing out of poverty; he felt an aversion to his 
former studies in science and mathematics because they did 
not refer to nor were concerned with God. 

One learns how faithful a believer, how literal a Christian 
Pascal was on reading his prayer for the right use of sickness, 
and his views on death, when his father died. These essays 
appear in some editions of the Thoughts. He does not look 
upon death as natural but as something imposed upon men to 
expiate their sins. Death is no evil but is really the begin- 
ning of life. Death with Jesus Christ is a joy, lovely and 
holy. Death is not natural nor the result of necessity but of 
a decree of Divine Providence, pre-ordained by God, etc. 
What a perversion of the human mind ! There is hardly any- 
thing like it in literature. Pascal deliberately allowed others 



Pascal : Thoughts 117 

inferior to him intellectually to do his thinking for him and 
to foist upon him such mad views. 

Also note the passionate prayer where he is imagining that 
some deity is angry with him for leading a perfectly natural 
life. He looks to God as to an unreasonable tyrant and he 
prostrates and humiliates himself before Him and attributes 
to deity a character that is outrageous and brutal. God is to 
Pascal a punisher of sinners and nothing else. He may be 
appeased by prayer and then send down His grace. Pascal 
prays neither for health nor life nor sickness nor death but 
for anything that might be advantageous to God's glory and 
his own salvation. Why should sickness be necessary to in- 
crease God's glory or Pascal's salvation? Why shout to this 
deity as if one were a contemptible worm and ask to be for- 
given for things about which the deity is not concerned? 
Poor Pascal ! how tragically sincere he was in this prayer ! 
How it distils pain, yet how it seethes with loathsome doc- 
trines ! He does not ask for exemption from pain but for 
religious consolation along with his pain. 

Many of Pascal's proofs rest on the Scriptures them- 
selves. He does not regard them as a series of books written 
by men at different times and liable to error. Of course 
he considers the world a few thousand years old and finds 
proof of the creation in this way. " Shem, who saw Lamech, 
who saw Adam, saw also Jacob, who saw those who saw 
Moses." He believes that Adam was the witness and guar- 
dian of the promise concerning the savior and that many 
other characters in the Old Testament had a supernatural 
power in being able to describe him and foretell his existence. 
Pascal should not have tried to prove his case by falling back 
on the Bible, for those who accept it as the word of God need 



118 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

nothing else to convince them; and those who look upon it as 
a collection of ancient literature and not a book of Divine 
Revelation repudiate Pascal's examples from it. 

He thinks because some philosophers are mistaken in their 
views and others admit their inability to solve all problems, 
that therefore philosophy is a failure and will not console 
man. He forgets that what he himself does is to accept 
theology instead of philosophy and probably because it im- 
pudently claims to know the answers to the most mysterious 
questions, whereas it is really far more mistaken than most 
systems of philosophy. But to some people the rational ideas 
of great thinkers are more consoling and give them more of 
an insight into truth than theology. 

Many cultured people have no faith in revealed religion, 
although they have many emotions in common with religious 
people. They may be impressed with the helplessness of 
man in the face of calamities; with his blind despair when 
confronted with the death of those he loves. Almost every 
intelligent person at times wonders about the riddle of exist- 
ence and tries some solution. Many must pray to a personal 
God who, they think, will ward off their calamities and then 
probably give them eternal life. Others find their ideas and 
feelings expressed in books by great thinkers, in art, in music. 

The leading objections that Pascal brings against philoso- 
phers is probably better shown in the " Conversation of Pascal 
with M. De Saci on Epictetus and Montaigne," which is 
printed in some editions of the Thoughts. The Stoics attrib- 
uted greatness to human nature while the Epicureans and 
sceptics attributed weakness to it; contrarieties were placed 
in the same subject. Now faith places them in different sub- 
jects, infirmity is placed in man and power in God. There- 



Pascal : Thoughts 119 

fore both sects should accept the gospel because it will satisfy 
the love of greatness in the Stoic sect by showing them that a 
God has died for them and it will satisfy the other two sects 
by showing them the corruption of man through sin. There- 
fore both will find the truth in the gospel. Pascal shows us 
here his strongest argument against philosophy and for Chris- 
tianity. It appears again and again in different forms through- 
out the Thoughts. 

How impotent it is we can readily see. The existence of 
religion does not depend on the greatness or littleness of human 
nature. A religion is not true just because it teaches that man 
is corrupt and can be made great. A religion is not true because 
it contains on an exaggerated scale the germs of the leading 
idea in two different and opposite schools of philosophy. People 
may believe that man has faults or that he is often grand, 
without therefore accepting a faith that teaches man was 
once perfect and fell and that he may again become great by 
accepting a God who died for him. And then it matters not 
whether man is little or great. Men have their limitations 
and powers, and religion cannot increase the one nor diminish 
the other. The greatness and littleness of man have nothing 
at all to do with the question as to whether there is a God or 
not and what His nature is. 

Pascal's system does not take into consideration merit but 
grace. A man cannot be saved by his own deeds and virtues 
but by Divine Grace. Nor can man help being corrupt no 
matter how good and great he is. Pascal even sought to make 
us believe, by asking us to start with some religious rites like 
taking holy water and having masses said, even though we did 
not believe in them. 



120 Dante and Other Waning Classics 

Still he is rich in general ideas and these are among his more 
valuable and permanent thoughts. When he thinks for him- 
self and does not refer to theology, we get profound views that 
still sway us. No one worshipped thought more than Pascal, 
no one felt its dignity more. He has given us some ideas 
that have become part of the world's way of thinking and yet 
they do not savor of his religion. We are all familiar with 
his comparison of man to a thinking reed, who is more noble 
than a universe which would destroy him because he would 
know that he is dying while the universe would not know what 
it is achieving. It is Pascal who said that if the nose of 
Cleopatra had been shorter, the face of the world had been 
changed, and if there hadn't been a grain of sand in Crom- 
well's bladder a new dynasty and religion would have pre- 
vailed. In short when Pascal does not write as an apologist 
for religion he is still vital. Critics have congratulated them- 
selves that he never finished his main theme and gave us his 
philosophic views first. 

But nevertheless his real intention as an apologist over- 
shadowed his secular thoughts. We admire and love him, 
but we feel that he is already largely obsolete. " We cannot 
follow him without treason to our highest interests," said 
Leslie Stephen of him. We are interested in his pains and in 
the fact that he set up an ideal for himself even though it is 
not our own. We watch a fellow creature troubled about 
some things that do not disturb many of us. We know of his 
great physical sufferings and our heart bleeds for him. We 
try not to appear angry at his misanthropy and his unnatural- 
ness. But we feel that he is more often in the wrong than in 
the right. We see in him a man who loved the truth passion- 
ately and who almost invariably grasped at falsehood. He 



Pascal : Thoughts 121 

is surpassed intellectually by most of the great sceptics of 
France in the seventeenth century. Their views have received 
additional support by the latest scientific discoveries and 
many of these men are undeservedly forgotten, overshadowed 
by Pascal. He is not one of the real glories of French litera- 
ture. The prose literature of France in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries can show us greater thinkers. 

Pascal's Thoughts is another one of those classics whose 
fame declined in the eighteenth century. It would be well 
for the progress of thought that his sun should set again. The 
modern apologists for dogma who are not honest thinkers 
draw largely from the Thoughts. Pascal after Darwin sounds 
anomalous. The man who bases philosophy on revelation 
and morality on asceticism is antiquated for modern times. 
Yet much can be extracted from his works to give him a 
fairly respectable though not a very high place in the temple 
of fame. Probably he deserves to be better known for his 
mathematical and scientific discoveries than for his religious 
apologies. The laws he discovered about atmospheric pres- 
sure and the equilibrium of fluids are still true ; his Christian 
evidence is obsolete. The world will always regret that a 
precocious mathematical genius who composed a treatise on 
Conic Sections before he was 16 years old should have stepped 
out into an abyss of superstition and dogma. 

What is surprising is the hold he has had on modern writers 
like St. Beuve and Pater. Even Nietzsche loved him. Nietz- 
sche called him the " only logical Christian " and blamed his 
ruin on Christianity. But George Moore was bold enough to 
write : " Les Pensees could appear to me only as infinitely 
childish ; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile 
to one of such modern and exotic taste as myself." 



APPENDIX 

Adverse Views on" Dante 

Landor said : " It would be difficult to form an idea of a 
poem into which so many personages are introduced contain- 
ing so few delineations of character, so few touches that excite 
sympathy, so few elementary signs for our instruction, so few 
topics for our delight, so few excursions for our recreation ." 

Emerson's biographer, Cabot, reports the opinion of the 
sage of Concord on the Florentine poet as follows : " A man 
to put in a museum, but not in your house : another Zerah 
Colburn; a prodigy of imaginative function, executive rather 
than contemplative or wise/' (Zerah Colburn was a mathe- 
matical prodigy.) 

Oliver Goldsmith said : " He shows a strange mixture of 
good sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his 
reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived. 
As in the land of Benim a man may pass as a prodigy of 
parts who can read, so in an age of barbarity a small degree 
of excellence secures success." 

Strindberg in his autobiography speaks thus of the Divine 
Comedy: "Even with regard to its own time the work is 
not an epoch-making one; it is not in advance of its period, 
but belongs strictly to it, or rather lags behind it. It is 
a linguistic monument for Italy, nothing more . . . . it is 
too insignificant to be regarded as a link in the development 
of culture." 

Voltaire in his correspondence writes as follows : " There 
are to be found among us, in the eighteenth century, people 
9 



124 Appendix 

who force themselves to admire feats of imagination as stu- 
pidly extravagant and as barbarous as this." 

Goethe registered this opinion in his Italian Travels: " The 
hell was to me altogether horrible, the purgatory neither one 
thing nor another, and the paradise dreadfully slow." 

Leigh Hunt says : " Such a vision as that of his poem (in a 
theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of 
a hypochondriacal savage and his nutshell a rottenness to be 
spit out of the mouth." 

Lamartine, the French poet, finds in Dante " a coarse triv- 
iality which descends to cynicism of expression and debauchery 
of image, a quintessence of scholastic theology which rises to 
vaporisation of the idea, finally to say everything in a word, a 
great man and a bad book." 

To Horace Walpole " Dante was extravagant, absurd, dis- 
gusting ; in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." 

To Metzsche Dante was " the hyena poetising in tombs." 

Howard Candler in an article called " The Black-Washing 
of Dante " published in the Nineteenth Century says : " And 
so we leave him, the mighty personification of medievalism and 
scholasticism, the last apostle of unquestioning faith in the 
figments of tradition, without a single lesson for the future, 
and utterly unmoved by any free breath of that sceptical spirit 
which ushered in the Eeformation and the modern world." 

Adverse Views on Milton 

Carlyle is quoted in Cunningham's Diary as follows : 
"Paradise Lost is absurd. I never could take to it all — 

though now and again clouds of splendor rolled in upon the 

scene." 



Appendix 125 

Goethe's verdict appears in a letter to Schiller dated July 
31, 1799: 

" The subject is detestable, outwardly plausible and inwardly 
worm-eaten and hollow. With the exception of the few natural 
and vigorous motives there are a number which are lame and 
false, and which offend one." 

Poe wrote : " The fact is, if the 'Paradise Lost were written 
to-day (assuming that it had never been written when it 
was), not even its eminent, although overestimated merits, 
would counterbalance, either in the public view, or in the 
opinion of any critic at once intelligent and honest, the multi- 
tudinous incongruities that are part and parcel of its plot/' 

Samuel Johnson spoke for many people when he said: 
" Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires 
and lays down, and forgets to take up again. No one ever 
wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than 
a pleasure." 

Of course Walt Whitman would hardly care for the poem. 
He said to Horace Traubel " . . . . even as a story it enlists 
little of my attention : he seems to me like a bird — soaring yet 
overweighted : dragged down as if hindered — too greatly hin- 
dered : a lamb in its beak : its flight not graceful, powerful, 
beautiful, satisfying, like the gulls we see on the Delaware in 
midwinter." 

Voltaire in his novel Candide has a character who speaks 
thus of the renowned work : " This obscure poem, fantastic 
and revolting, was despised when it first made its appearance, 
and I treat it now as it was treated in his (Milton's) own 
country by his own generation." 

Scherer, the noted French critic, exclaimed : " Paradise Lost 
is an unreal poem, a grotesque poem, a tiresome poem. There 



126 Appendix 

is not one reader in a hundred who can read books nine and 
ten without a smile, or books eleven and twelve without a 
yawn. The thing does not hold together: it is a pyramid 
balanced on its apex, the most terrible of problems solved by 
the most childish of means." 

A still greater critic, Taine, said : " He gives us correct 
solemn discourse, and gives us nothing more; his characters 
are speeches, and in their sentiments we find only heaps of 
puerilities and contradictions." 

The author of Omar Khayam, Fitzgerald, remarked: "I 
never could read ten lines of Paradise Lost without stumbling 
at some pedantry that tipped me at once out of paradise or 
even hell into the schoolroom worse than either." 

Adverse Views on Bunyan 

Poe wrote : " That the Pilgrim's Progress is a ludicrously 
overrated book, owing its Seeming popularity to one or two of 
those accidents in critical literature which by the critical are. 
sufficiently well understood, is a matter upon which no two 
thinking people disagree." 

The late Samuel Butler, whom Shaw rediscovered for us, 
said : " The Pilgrim's Progress consists mainly of a series of 
infamous libels upon life and things ; it is a blasphemy against 
certain fundamental ideas of right and wrong which our con- 
sciences most instinctly approve .... There is no conception 
of the faith that a man should do his duty cheerfully, with all 
his might, though, as far as he can see, he will never be paid 
directly or indirectly either here or hereafter." 

Taine wrote in a letter as follows, about the celebrated 
allegory : " It is a nursery tale, a blood-curdling allegory, 
showing the terrible inner mind of one of those fanatics; 



Appendix 127 

groans, invasions of the spirit, the belief in damnation, visions 
of the devil, scruples, etc." 

Eichard Dowling in a book called Ignorant Essays says: 
" The whole thing is grotesquely absurd and impossible to 
imagine. There is no sobriety in it ; no sobriety of keeping in 
it ; and no matter how wild the effort or vision of imagination 
may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in it, or it is 
delirium, not imagination, disease, not inspiration. As far as 
I can see there is no trace of imagination or even fancy in the 
Pilgrim's Progress. The story never happened at all. It is 
a horrible attempt to tinkerize the Bible." 

Francis Thompson, the poet, reviewing Dowling's book sym- 
pathetically, speaks thus of the allegory : " We have searched 
the book in vain for a single scene with a single master-touch 
of delineation ; and the result has been thoroughly to convince 
us that the man was incapable of such a thing, he Tcnew him- 
self incapable, and therefore instinctively shirked description." 



" The subject which you have chosen is most interesting and you have treated it 
with a certain superiority. Of course you are right, we should no longer adopt the 
old ideas expressed in the so-called classical books. . . .1 think that you are 

very well gifted."— George Brandes. 

The Shifting of Literary Values 

By Albert Mordell 

Paper bound, 84 pages. 8vo. Price 50 cents, net. Acropolis Pub- 
lishing Company, Phila. 

Comments Upon The Shifting of Literary Values 

Sir Arthur W. Pinero: An exhaustive and thoughtful work. 

John Galsworthy: I thought it very ably written. 

Havelock Ellis: Has a useful function to perform, and I hope it 
will be widely read. It should help many to see where they 
stand. 

Arnold Bennet: In principle I am decidedly in agreement with it. 

Henry Mills Alden : I read it at one sitting as I found it interesting. 
The argument is adequate within the compass of the intended 
application. 

Bliss Perry: I have read it twice with genuine interest. The 
theoretical basis of the essay seems to me sound, but I suppose 
no two of us would think quite alike in the matter of concrete 
application of the general principle. 

George E. Woodberry: What I like in the essay, is its acquaintance 
with the field, its thoughtfulness and careful way and its 
independence; it makes for freedom, too, in all its proposals, 
and for the opportunity of growth by sincerity. In a word, I 
like the spirit of it altogether. 

William Lyon Phelps: What I particularly like about it is its 
absolutely correct position that the classics should not be 
judged by traditional weight of authority, but by each indi- 
vidual modern reader. I value independence in all matters 
of criticism as in everything else. Let each man speak the 
truth about works of art as he sees the truth. 



" He is not a crude philistine entering the ranks of literary 
criticism solely for the purpose of trying to smash long-established 
reputations, just for the fun of the thing. He belongs to the pro- 
gressive school of thought, and is anxious to make us think about 
the classics instead of dreaming about them. "We cannot agree 
with Mr. Mordell on many points, but we are bound to admit that 
there is a certain amount of truth in his argument, much to com- 
mend in his appeal that we should reverently examine some of our 
literary gods, and test them, not by ancient tradition, ancient 
praise, but in the light of modern thought." — F. Hadland Davis in 
The Academy (London). 

'■ The Shifting of Literary Values, by Albert Mordell, is a useful 

piece of work which is well worth the doing Many persons 

no doubt will be shocked at the attacks upon their literary idols. 
But when once they perceive that their whole outlook on life has 
changed, and that the ideas presented in the great masterpieces 
of literature are entirely antagonistic to all their beliefs, they will 
acknowledge, if they are honest, that literary values have changed. 
Mr. Mordell has struck a rich vein, which we should like to see 
worked on a larger scale than in the pamphlet before us." — West- 
minister Review. 

" The eternal conflict between the radical and conservative finds 
new and vivid expression in a booklet published by Albert Mordell, 
of Philadelphia. Mr. Mordell can best be described as a literary 
insurgent He has all the fire and impetuosity of youth, and, like 
a new David, he goes out to engage in combat with the Giant of 
Tradition." — Current Literature. 

" Does the dead hand of classic literature, fastening chains 
forged of obsolete and forgotten ideals, hold us to a moral and 
intellectual stagnancy? The author of this essay says it does, and 
what is worse, in large part he proves it. His treatise is a keen, 
penetrating analysis of literary values, in which there is a thrill- 
ing destruction of ancient literary idols which everybody puts on 
his shelves — and nearly everybody leaves there." — Duluth (Minn.) 
Herald. 

" The Shifting of Literary Values, by the way an admirable title, 
uses various arguments to bring about the conclusion that books 
of the old writers permeated with the ideas of monasticism, 
stoicism, feudalism and puritanism, are of scant, if any value, the 

world having moved beyond their doctrines and sentiments 

Literature is progressive, moves with the times, becomes the 
thinking pulse of every generation. That the old writers thought 
differently, felt differently than is general to-day, and in conse 
quence wrote differently is only natural. The standards of one 
age are not those of another; and that in this train should occur 
a shifting of moral and henceforth of literary values is a problem 
of pure and simple common sense." — The Craftsman (New York). 



" The book is extraordinary because it does what many other 
people (including, we fancy, George Brandes, whose disciple Mr. 

Mordell is) have long been desiring to do While George 

Brandes (perhaps) has been drilling his forces, this hot-headed 
critic has led his mob of sans culottes for an attack on the Bastille 

of critical tradition All that we can do is to urge our readers 

to procure this book, and find out how many notable critics have 
agreed with them in their private literary heresies." — Chicago 
Evening Post Friday Literary Supplement (Editorial). 

" Mr. Mordell gives evidence of wide and careful reading, and 
his judgments are expressed with scholarly sobriety. His little 
book deserves the attention of every lover of literature, because it 
is stimulating even to those who disagree, and opens up subjects 
for speculation that will surely arouse new interest in matters 
literary." — The Philadelphia Record. 

" The intention and spirit of The Shifting of Literary Values, 
by Albert Mordell, are sincere and reasonable enough, for there 
is no doubt about the shifting sands of literature, nor the old fact 

that it can express only the human nature back of it Mr. 

Mordell has the right idea, where the shifting values are con- 
cerned; life is doing its best to shift them." — Baltimore News. 

" That many a mute inglorious Milton lies buried in the church- 
yards is asserted anew by Albert Mordell, in his new volume, The 

Shifting of Literary Values Mordell insists that the pagans, 

Plato, Epictetus, Aurelius and Boethius have been elevated to a 
place on the parlor table with Baxter and Bunyan merely because 
they, too, advocated stoicism and derived euphemistic maxims 
that weren't so to bolster up an impossible theory of the justice 
of life, whereas powerful thinkers like Lucretius, Lucian, Spinoza, 
Montaigne and Stendhal have been ignored until the present 
European renaissance in literature and thought." — Detroit 
Tribune (Editorial). 

" Mr. Mordell's main thesis is essentially sound. Literary 
values are shifting because our moral viewpoint is shifting. Good- 
ness in our day is coming more and more to be a matter of helping 
as many of one's fellow men as possible, and books embodying the 
old monastic and puritanic ideals have less value for us — other 
things being equal — than books filled with the spirit of social 
service." — Chicago Record-Herald. 

" . . . . This little book by Mordell shows us how unwise and 
illogical it is for us to class under the general head of great a list 
of old philosophies so contradictory that they devour one another, 
and so reflective of the morality of the time that gave them birth 
that they are utterly out of harmony with present day social and 
personal ethics." — Paul Hanna in The Evening Telegraph 
(Phila.). 



" If it be true that this work is such ' a radical onslaught ' as 
contended, then so much the better, for Mr. Mordell has splendidly 
demonstrated the reasons for the attack and has supplied the best 
brief argument for his position that one could possibly make." — 
Justin H. Shaw, The Call, (New York). 

" Prom Philadelphia, the home of the Saturday Evening Post 
and the Ladies' Home Journal, comes a modest little blue-covered 
brochure that has more real intellectual significance than half a 
hundred issues of either of the much-advertised and widely-circu- 
lated periodicals named. It is called The Shifting of Literary 
Values." — Los Angeles Times. 



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